From Camel in Action, Second Edition by Claus Ibsen and Jonathan Anstey

Transactions can be used as a means for coordinating state updates among distributed systems to form an unit of work as a whole.

Related to this concept is idempotency. The term idempotent is used in mathematics to describe a function that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial result. In computing, the term idempotent is used to describe an operation that will produce the same results if executed once or multiple times.