Importance of Online Transaction Processing

Prepare and submit a term paper on Importance of Online Transaction Processing.

Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. The examples of Online Transaction Processing applications include electronic reservations, electronic transfer of funds, inventory control, telephone switching and centralized command and control services. Online Transaction Processing is used by a variety of industries, such as banking, airlines, mail-order retailing, marketing and manufacturing. Examples include electronic banking, processing of orders online, airline reservations, employee time clock systems, trading in stocks, shares and bonds and various e-commerce applications are all examples of an online transaction processing environment. OLTP is generally used in processing large scale volumes of transactions. Transaction monitoring software that deals with the online processing of transactions on a mass scale represent a combination of several applications, such as operating systems, database systems, operations programming languages and communication systems.

Bernstein and Newcomer (1997) have pointed out that the software environment that is the prime driver of online transaction processing applications are based on Transaction Processing monitoring products and some of the examples he cites and elaborates upon are ACMS, CICS, Encina, IMS, Pathway/TS, Top End, or TUXEDO. The most commonly used software is IBM’s CICS. Based upon measurements of usage in terms of a number of licenses, customers and the revenue it garners, CICS appears to have the largest market share of any transaction processing software application. (Bernstein and Newcomer, 1997:127). The CICS system was first developed in 1968 and is now able to run on several different platforms and operating systems, using the appropriate “process and memory abstractions” available on each system. (Bernstein, 1997: 127).