Execute Non-Database Operations Within a Transaction

Expanding transactions for non-database operations

With this knowledge, there is an opportunity to expand transactions to include non-database operations. Imagine that our application uses an external search engine such as Elasticsearch. Whenever we change the database, we have to update our search engine. However, it’s essential to keep the database and the search engine in sync.

• if the database changes fail, we don’t want to update the search engine.
• if the search engine update fails, we want to roll back the changes to the database.

Our MusicDB application has a MusicDB.SearchEngine module that handles search engine updates via its update function to explore this scenario. This is just a placeholder module—our sample application doesn’t include a real search engine, so the module’s functions simulate the behavior.

To update the search engine along with the changes to the database, we call the appropriate functions from within the transaction by doing the following: