Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator MSDTC Requirement for KTA

Distributed versus non-distributed transactions

TransactionScope is an important class in the .NET Framework. The main responsibility of this class is supporting transactions from a code block. Kofax TotalAgility uses this class for managing both local and distributed transactions from TotalAgility code.

TransactionScope uses the LTM - Lightweight Transaction Manager in .NET. If you open more than one connection in the same transaction or go between databases, TransactionScope will automatically promote the transaction to the two-phase commit transaction manager, the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC).

Note: You must use MSDTC as required when deploying the Kofax TotalAgility databases you choose to separate into individual databases, such as Audit, Archive, Live, and Documents.

Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator

Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) is a Windows service component used to coordinate the transaction infrastructure for distributed systems such as file systems, message queues, Kofax TotalAgility Database Guidance 5 and databases. In this case, a transaction generally structures interactions between autonomous agents in a distributed system.

Each transaction is a state transformation with four key properties commonly referred to as the ACID properties:

1. Atomic (all or nothing)
2. Consistent (legal)
3. Isolated (independent of concurrent transactions)
4. Durable (once it happens, it cannot be reversed)

There are different techniques that implement the ACID properties but the most commonly used is the two-phase commit