Sagas.¶
Garcia-Molina, H., & Salem, K. (1987). Sagas. Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 16(3), 249-259.
Cited by¶
8 citations across 8 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Orchestration
- Distributed software. Workflow engines that keep a durable execution log across service calls; saga coordinators driving multi-service business transactions; build servers deciding which stages run against which artifacts; container control planes that repeatedly compare a declared desired state against observed reality and issue the difference as instructions; tool-calling agent loops that select the next tool from the accumulated transcript.
This sourceIntroduces the coordinator that records completed sub-transactions and, on failure, walks its own record backwards issuing compensating actions.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Sagas supports the saga-coordinator item (a log-driven coordinator that runs compensating steps on failure) but not workflow engines, build servers, container control planes or agent loops.
“we propose the notion of a saga A LLT 1s a saga if it can be written as a sequence of transactions that can be interleaved with other transactions”
- Distributed software. Workflow engines that keep a durable execution log across service calls; saga coordinators driving multi-service business transactions; build servers deciding which stages run against which artifacts; container control planes that repeatedly compare a declared desired state against observed reality and issue the difference as instructions; tool-calling agent loops that select the next tool from the accumulated transcript.
- Unity Test
- The database transaction boundary as a unity test on a cluster of writes transferred into long-running workflow systems as the saga pattern, with explicit committed steps and compensating actions when the workflow-level whole must be undone.
This sourceIntroduces the saga — a long-running workflow declared as a whole over committed steps with compensating actions, a deliberately weaker unity test than an ACID transaction.
SupportedVerified against the work's full text
The paper introduces sagas for long-lived transactions: committed sub-transactions treated as a non-atomic unit, with compensating transactions undoing partial executions.
“the transactions m a saga are related to each other and should be executed as a (non-atomic) unit any partial executions of the saga are undesirable, and if they occur, must be”
- The database transaction boundary as a unity test on a cluster of writes transferred into long-running workflow systems as the saga pattern, with explicit committed steps and compensating actions when the workflow-level whole must be undone.
- Unverified Precondition
- And the referential-integrity discipline of database design transferred into workflow systems as saga patterns, compensating transactions, and idempotent retries.
This sourceIntroduces the saga and compensating transactions, the referential-integrity discipline of database design transferred into long-running workflow systems.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
The paper supplies sagas and compensating transactions for long-lived transactions, but says nothing about referential integrity or idempotent retries.
“the transactions m a saga are related to each other and should be executed as a (non-atomic) unit any partial executions of the saga are undesirable, and if they occur, must be”
- And the referential-integrity discipline of database design transferred into workflow systems as saga patterns, compensating transactions, and idempotent retries.
Mechanisms¶
- Compensating Action Protocol
- Its strength is graceful recovery precisely where atomic rollback cannot reach: distributed steps, real-world actions, and cross-system commitments that a transaction can neither hold nor undo.
This sourceDefines a saga as a long-lived transaction decomposed into transactions whose partial execution is amended through compensating transactions when completion fails.
- Its strength is graceful recovery precisely where atomic rollback cannot reach: distributed steps, real-world actions, and cross-system commitments that a transaction can neither hold nor undo.
- Compensating-Event Correction
- It is the event-log expression of the compensating-transaction idea used to unwind distributed work that cannot be rolled back atomically.
This sourceDefines sagas as distributed transaction sequences whose completed steps are amended through compensating transactions after failure.
- It is the event-log expression of the compensating-transaction idea used to unwind distributed work that cannot be rolled back atomically.
- Counter-Defect Rollback Runbook
- It is the semantic cousin of a compensating transaction: a defined action that undoes a committed step rather than pretending it never happened.
This sourceDefines predefined compensating transactions that are run after partial saga execution to semantically amend the effects of already completed steps.
- It is the semantic cousin of a compensating transaction: a defined action that undoes a committed step rather than pretending it never happened.
- Transactional Rollback
- The failed release is abandoned cleanly; nothing is left in a broken intermediate state, and the recovery is fully visible for the post-incident review.
This sourceDefines a saga as a transaction sequence whose committed steps are compensated when the saga aborts, yielding an acceptable termination state.
- The failed release is abandoned cleanly; nothing is left in a broken intermediate state, and the recovery is fully visible for the post-incident review.
- Workflow-Model Compiler
- The compiler wires the saga: if shipping fails after payment, it triggers the compensating refund and releases the inventory reservation, unwinding completed steps in reverse.
This sourceDefines a saga as a sequence of transactions whose partial execution is amended by compensating transactions when completion fails.
- The compiler wires the saga: if shipping fails after payment, it triggers the compensating refund and releases the inventory reservation, unwinding completed steps in reverse.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 8 citations: 1 supported, 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.
Registry ID ref:fd6c279c7a5e · see in the full table