Transaction across multiple databases (C#)

Question

I'm working on an application which will be updating multiple databases (SQL Server 2008 and Oracle 11g). TransactionScope seemed like the logical way to ensure updates were always committed correctly, but it seems that installing MSDTC is not going to be an option. In the future, it's also possible this application could be using data sources which don't support distributed transactions.

I've spent many hours trying to come up with another solution but nothing seems like it will work. All searches point back to TransactionScope and distributed transactions.

The application is written in C#, using the Entity Framework. Anyone have any suggestions, which won't require being escalated to distributed transactions? Here's a list of ideas I've had which have gone nowhere.

+TransactionScope: Can't use MSDTC. Future data sources may not support distributed transactions.

+Manually track and rollback transactions: I haven't found a good way to do this within Entity Framework.

+Queue/log failures so they can be re-committed by another process: Can't come up with a good way to store the failed commits generically. Also need to make sure the re-commit doesn't overwrite newer data.

Answer 1

@ThinkJet. That related link is an interesting opinion. In my case a small failure, like what is described, would not be a huge deal. We currently have other stuff in place which tries to keep all these systems in sync (not always successfully). If one or two transactions did fail it should be picked up by these processes.

After reading through these comments, I might try to have this library write the data to it's own database. Then, sync those changes to the other sources so that the other applications can see the changes. It would cause a slight delay in some updates but even that would be better than what we have now.