Workflow system deal with long lived transactions

Question

How can a workflow system deal with long lived transactions?

Answer 1

To deal with the problem of long-lived transactions, we use the Sagas model, while structuring a long-lived transaction as a sequence of sub transactions, and each of them is associated with a compensating sub transaction. In case one of the sub transactions in such a sequence aborts the previous sub transactions are undone by automatically scheduling the associated compensating sub transactions. By allowing transactions to release partial results before they complete, we are able to avoid the long-duration waiting problem caused by long-lived transactions.