STDL

A Portable Language for Transaction Processing

Philip A. Bernstein1, Per O. Gyllstrom2, Tom Wimberg

Digital Equipment Corporation
Cambridge Research Lab

CRL 93/5 March 8, 1993

Structured Transaction Definition Language (STDL) is a language for
distributed transaction processing, developed by the Multivendor Integration Architecture consortium. STDL is a block?structured language, specialized for transaction processing. It is designed for application portability across multiple STDL implementations on different vendors' transaction processing systems. This paper describes STDL's transaction features: transaction bracketing, transactional remote procedure call, transactional queuing, recoverable
terminal I/O, and transactional exception handling.

STDL relies on standard C and COBOL for most application logic and
all operations on SQL databases and files. All transactional features of
STDL and new features outside standard C and COBOL are isolated in
procedures written in the STDL language. These procedures are called
tasks. This isolation of transactional features is quite different than
other persistent programming languages: one can use applications written in standard C or COBOL; and to implement STDL, it is possible to map clauses of task language onto operations of most any
distributed TP monitor.

Keywords: transactions, transaction processing, TP monitor, remote procedure call, queuing, exception handling

? Digital Equipment Corporation 1993. All rights reserved.

1Address: Digital Equipment Corporation, One Kendall Square ? Building 700, Cambridge, MA. 02139 Internet: pbernstein@crl.dec.com
2Address for Per Gyllstrom and Tom Wimberg: Digital Equipment Corporation, 151 Taylor Street, Littleton, MA 01460?1407