Encyclopedia of Database Systems

2018 Edition
| Editors: Ling Liu, M. Tamer Özsu

Split Transactions

  • George KarabatisEmail author
Reference work entry


The split transaction is an extended transaction model that introduces two new transaction management primitives/operations, namely, split and join. The split operation on a transaction T splits T and replaces it with two serializable transactions; each one is later committed or aborted independently of the other. The inverse of split is the join operation on a transaction T which dissolves T by joining its results with a target transaction S.

Key Points

The concept of split transactions was introduced by Pu, Kaiser, and Hutchinson in [ 3] and later elaborated in [ 2] to support open-ended activities such as CAD/CAM projects, engineering type of applications, and software development. The syntax of the split-transaction operation on transaction T produces two new transactions A and B and dissolves T [ 2, 3]:
  • Split Transaction (

  • A: (AReadSet, AWriteSet, AProcedure)

  • B: (BReadSet, BWriteSet, BProcedure)) where AReadSet, AWriteSet, BReadSet, and BWriteSetare sets of data items...


Recommended Reading

  1. 1.
    Chrysanthis PK, Ramamritham K. Synthesis of extended transaction models using ACTA. ACM Trans Database Syst. 1994;19(3):450–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 2.
    Kaiser GE, Pu C. Dynamic restructuring of transactions. In: Elmagarmid AK, editor. Database transaction models for advanced applications. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; 1992. p. 265–95.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Pu C, Kaiser GE, Hutchinson NC. Split-transactions for open-ended activities. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1988. p. 26–37.Google Scholar

Copyright information


Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of Maryland, Baltimore Country (UMBC)BaltimoreUSA

Section editors and affiliations

  • Panos K. Chrysanthis
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of PittsburghPittsburghUSA