Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Distributed Transactions and Two-Phase Commit

The evolution of transactions from centralized to distributed systems has followed the evolution of computing from a centralized resource model to its modern day distributed and federated architectures. The underlying goals in distributed transaction processing are the same as in the traditional centralized model: to ensure a unit of work either successfully completes or logically appears to have never been run at all.

To achieve these goals, distributed transaction processing systems have attempted to keep the notion of ACID transactions as their dominant paradigm. While this might at first seem a tough goal to coordinate multiple systems through a transaction, the key algorithm which enables ACID ...