Transactional Intent

Data state in a data management system such as a database is the result of the transactions performed on that data management system. Approaches such as single-message transactions and field calls come closer than before/after values to expressing the intent of a transaction, the semantic transformation that should be performed on the data state even if that state is different than what was previously read. But intent is an even higher-level semantic description. This paper illustrates the use of intent-based transactions and processes in several applications, and describes the benefits from exploiting transactional intent.