Ivan Artamonov – Senior Lecturer, Department of Informatics and Cybernetics, Faculty of Informatics, Accounting and Service, Baikal State University of Economics and Law.
Address: 11, Lenin str., Irkutsk, 664003, Russian Federation.
E-mail: dark@darkis.ru

Service-oriented system concepts and descriptions of interactions between heterogeneous computing environments in scientific literature and international standards customarily use term “business transaction”. However, this object with its properties and characteristics is rarely studied in detail. When specifying distributed systems building templates, transactional properties of a composition of services, orchestration and choreography problems, etc., authors of technical works rely on an intuitive understanding of this term by the reader. Therefore, business transaction is described here as a business process and as some complex operation performed in corporate applications environment. Such environment adds a number of complex characteristics to a business transaction which ensure its ability to interact. This work shows that a business transaction tries to support ACID properties of system transactions; however, due to complex nature, a part of those properties is diminished and cannot be fulfilled which fact substantially limits the use of the existing distributed transaction management tools. On the basis of the analysis of advanced transaction models, and also of orchestration and choreography protocols, this article distinguishes among three different types of business transactions: elementary, long-term and business process transactions. It should be noted that all the three transaction types completely match the broad definition of business transaction, and separate definition of a “business  processes transaction” does not prevent elementary and long-term transactions from performing business processes too.