Various mechanisms are presented that allow for the coordination of transactions in a managed runtime environment. In one aspect, a runtime environment that is hosted in a database system, includes an application programming interface (API). The API can surface the database transactions as ambient transactions, and present them to some user code. When the user code connects to some remote resource, the ambient transaction can be implicitly propagated to the remoter resource, resulting in coordination of the database transaction with any given transaction running in the remote resource.