Java Transaction API is a standard between the transaction manager and the entities participated in the distributed transaction system. These entities are transaction manager, the application server and transactional applications. JTA allows the applications to perform distributed transactions between one or more systems connected to the network. The database access power is greatly increased by supporting JTA in a JDBC driver.

The resource manager can be viewed as a RDBMS. This component handles the actual database management. The communication channel is the resource adapter which is a JDBC driver. For a specific enterprise database, the resource manager local transaction is performed for a single transaction.