Distributed workflows often cannot roll back every system through one database transaction. Instead, each completed side effect can define a compensation, such as canceling a reservation or issuing a reversing entry, that returns the business process to an acceptable state.
Compensation is not always a perfect erasure, so the workflow must record what happened and make each recovery action safe to retry. Agents should invoke only predefined compensations rather than improvising a reversal from natural-language instructions.
Acronyms and aliases
compensation operation variant
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
When is a compensating transaction needed?
It is needed when part of a multi-step workflow completed in an external system but later steps failed and ordinary rollback is unavailable.
Does compensation always restore the exact previous state?
No. It may create a new action that offsets the earlier effect while retaining an auditable history of both operations.
