In most applications, each transaction involves a small number of operations that can be completed in a fraction of a second or in a minute or two at the most. Withdrawing money from a bank account, updating hours worked in a payroll application, and entering a medical record are all examples.
In some respects, geographic data is no different. Updating data, such as a customer address or the zoning designation of a parcel, is an operation that could be completed in a short transaction taking one or two minutes.
Often, though, you need to spend one or two hours graphically moving, modifying, and adding data to complete a work order. There are also cases where you need to work on a transaction for days or even months to complete all the edits, such as for an engineering design. Even though you may make a very large number of changes, you still want to commit them as a single long transaction.