Definition of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) in Network Encyclopedia.

What is Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS)?

Microsoft Transaction Server was a software included in the Microsoft Windows NT Option Pack and Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition, that provided a variety of services for component-based applications, including transaction support, security, and thread pooling.

In Windows 2000 Server, this component has been merged with the Component Object Model (COM) to form COM+, and the resulting Windows 2000 services are known by the name Component Services.

How it works

Microsoft Transaction Server (or Component Services in Windows 2000) defines a transactional programming model and supplies a run-time environment and graphical user interface (GUI) administration tool for managing transactional applications. It provides automatic support for transactions, thread management, database connection pooling, process isolation, and other features that are essential for developing multiuser applications. Portions of a distributed application running on different computers and coordinated using MTS can communicate with each other as though they were installed on a single computer.

MTS includes the following features:

• Configurable security. Administrators can define roles and then specify the components and interfaces that clients belonging to each role can access.
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 databases as well as for resource managers such as Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) Server in Windows NT (or Message Queuing in Windows 2000).
• Database connection pooling. You can reuse existing database connections instead of creating new ones, thereby improving performance and scalability.
• Process isolation. You can separate applications into packages that each run in their own process, making applications more fault-tolerant and secure against failures.
• COM Transaction Integrator for initiating and controlling Custom Information Control System (CICS) transactions on IBM mainframe computers.
• Support for a broad range of development tools, including Microsoft Visual C++ and Microsoft Visual Basic.
• Component state management, which makes it easier to build applications with efficient resource sharing.