Distributed transaction

A distributed transaction is a database transaction in which two or more network hosts are involved. Usually, hosts provide transactional resources, while the transaction manager is responsible for creating and managing a global transaction that encompasses all operations against such resources. Distributed transactions, as any other transactions, must have all four ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties, where atomicity guarantees all-or-nothing outcomes for the unit of work (operations bundle). Open Group, a vendor consortium, proposed the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) Model (X/Open XA), which became a de facto standard for behavior of transaction model components. Databases are common transactional resources and, often, transactions span a couple of such databases. In this case, a distributed transaction can be seen as a database transaction that must be synchronized (or provide ACID properties) among multiple participating databases whi

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How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?

Rachid Guerraoui, Junxiong Wang

The atomic commit problem lies at the heart of distributed database systems. The problem consists for a set of processes (database nodes) to agree on whether to commit or abort a transaction (agreement property). The commit decision can only be taken if all processes are initially willing to commit the transaction, and this decision must be taken if all processes are willing to commit and there is no failure (validity property). An atomic commit protocol is said to be non-blocking if every correct process (a database node that does not fail) eventually reaches a decision (commit or abort) even if there are failures elsewhere in the distributed database system (termination property). Surprisingly, despite the importance of the atomic commit problem, little is known about its complexity. In this paper, we present, for the first time, a systematic study on the time and message complexity of the problem. We measure complexity in the executions that are considered the most frequent in practice, i.e., failure-free, with all processes willing to commit. In other words, we measure how fast a transaction can commit. Through our systematic study, we close many open questions like the complexity of synchronous non-blocking atomic commit. We also present optimal protocols which may be of independent interest. In particular, we present an effective protocol which solves what we call indulgent atomic commit that tolerates practical distributed database systems which are synchronous ``most of the time''.

2017

How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?

Rachid Guerraoui, Junxiong Wang

ACM Press2017

Looking Ahead in Open Multithreaded Transactions

Maxime Monod

Open multithreaded transactions constitute building blocks that allow a developer to design and structure the execution of complex distributed systems featuring cooperative and competitive concurrency in a reliable way. In this paper we describe an optimization to the standard open multithreaded transaction model that does not impose any participant synchronization when committing a transaction, but still provides the same execution semantics. This optimization - letting participants "look ahead" and continue their execution on the outside of the transaction - makes it possible to speed up the execution of in individual transaction with multiple participants tremendously. The paper describes all technical issues that had to be solved, e.g. adapting concurrency control of transactional objects to be look-ahead aware, adapting joining rules for lookahead participants, and re-defining exception handling in the presence of look-ahead.

2006

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