Chapter 1. An introduction to z/TPF and its role in a Service Oriented Architecture 7
For the purposes of our discussions, a transaction is a relatively small unit of work that
represents a portion of, and not necessarily an entire, business process. As an example, a
business process might be the act of purchasing a reservation for a seat on an airline. A
subcomponent of this business process is a request of the list of flights with the desired origin
and destination. This request is an example of a transaction; an inquiry is formed and
submitted to the reservation system, a lookup is performed to collect the data; that data is
then formatted and returned to the requester.
This can be compared to a batch job; for example, processing a payroll. ...