Transaction processing systems (TPS) directly support businesses by processing transactions that create or modify organizational data. TPS have four key characteristics - they provide rapid response, are reliable, are inflexible in processing standardized data, and enforce controlled processing through access rights. There are two types of TPS - real-time systems that immediately process transactions with instant confirmation, and batch systems that collect and process transactions in scheduled batches. Real-time systems have higher costs but provide benefits like concurrency controls and atomicity to ensure complete transactions.

1. Transaction Processing
Systems

2. • Transaction processing systems (TPS’s)
are those information systems that
work with the transactions of an
organisation.
• A transaction is an event that creates
or modifies data that is stored in an
information system.
• TPS’s differ from other systems in that
they directly support businesses.
• The four important characteristics of a
TPS are rapid response, reliability,
inflexibility and controlled processing.

3. • Rapid response: Businesses require
quick turnaround time.
• Reliability: Organisations rely on
their TPS. If it does fail quick and
accurate recovery is essential.
• Inflexibility: Transactions require
similitude of data. Non-standard
operations would lead to errors and a
slower response time.
• Controlled processing: The TPS
should enforce the organisational
operations in the manner that it
allocates rights and responsibilities.

4. • A TPS minimises the organisation’s
costs through a reduction of data
handling.
• This means that procedures need to
be examined and data needs to be
normalised.
• There are two types of transaction
processing: real-time processing and
batch processing.
• Batch processing is where all the
transaction data is collected and
processed at a specific time.

5. • Real-time processing is the
immediate processing of data.
• It provides instant confirmation of
the transaction.
• Two common examples are airline
reservation systems and banking.
• The two main concerns with real
time processing are concurrency and
atomicity.
• Concurrency ensures that two users
cannot change the same data at the
same time.

6. • Atomicity ensures that all the steps
involved in a transaction are completed
successfully as a group.
• That is, if the first step succeeds and
then further steps fail the entire
transaction is abandoned and the
processes are rolled back.
• All real time transactions have an
acceptable user response time factored
in.
• If the user exceeds this response time
then the transaction is also abandoned.

7. • Real time processing is more
expensive than batch processing due
to increased hardware and software
costs.
• A transaction processing monitor is
software that runs in the background
that allows transaction processing
applications to run efficiently.
• Differences between real-time and
batch processing: (p.116)