Vincent Dupree RLMT 610 Assignment #1 14 July 2012 Professor Hedgepeth
Transactions are the routine day-to-day activities performed by most organizations. some are commercial transactions (buying, selling products and services, paying bills etc) others involve recording or retrieving data (making a booking, enrolling a student at university looking up results etc) Most TPSs consist of all the components of a CBIS including databases, telecommunications, people, procedures, software and hardware. Also, individual transactions are relatively simple, but in most organizations, there are very large numbers of them - so speed and efficiency are important considerations. Typically, transaction processing business processes were among the first to be automated/computerized in most organizations, thus a lot of this early work with this type of system provides the foundation for current thinking about information systems.
The reason behind this is that is computer equipment was relatively expensive in these early days; these systems were among the easier to create small savings in the costs to process large numbers of transactions added up to significant amounts that would cover the costs of the expensive equipment. Few other business processes within typical organizations could provide these benefits. At this point, it is also worth noting that centralized systems were initially easier to control and could achieve economies of scale. Grosch's Law claimed that computing power was proportional to the square of the cost of the processor – this favored ever larger centralized mainframes over smaller distributed systems. This generally meant that these early transaction processing systems were co-located on one large central mainframe.
A key feature of most of these systems is the methods used to streamline the processing. One example is the use of bar codes - these speed up data capture and make it much more reliable. Without these, it can often be uneconomic to capture this data. another example is the transferring of data entry to the customers of the organization - bank customers using automatic teller machines are effectively doing the data entry for the bank; many Internet/e-commerce based applications are using the customers for data entry. Other key features of transaction processing systems include controls and reports. Controls ensure the systems objectives are properly met, for example, that the data integrity meets minimum standards reports are designed to give management an overview of the transactions performed, and are often used for decision making purposes. Taking into account the high workload of required transactions per second (TPS) problems to TP systems can arise and be addressed in the areas of the TPF, and the DDMS. The TPF is considered as a system to manage terminals and disk and does not provide a database management system with high-power transaction processing. The task to manage files and resources is thus in charge
