ConTracts - A Low-Level Mechanism for Building General-Purpose Workflow Management-Systems.
Banu Özden, Rajeev R. Rastogi, Abraham Silberschatz · IEEE Data(base) Engineering Bulletin · 1995
The ConTracts project was started to investigate the possibilities of handling long-lived computations in a database context. Note that the emphasis on databases is not a restriction. It simply acknowledges the fact that all long-lived computations by their very nature will accumulate a certain amount of state, will access shared data and will interact with the environment and with other long-lived computations. In other words, they perform a large number of activities that are properly supported by database systems. Hence, the discussion of long-lived computations and the definition of the role of databases in that context cannot be separated.