SQL Server® 2008 Administration: Instant Reference

6.3. Implement Distributed Transactions

SQL Server's standard data engine installation includes a tool called the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC). This utility is responsible for maintaining the integrity of distributed transactions in a SQL Server environment. You can think of the DTC as a "traffic cop," responsible for managing the interaction among the various data engine instances that participate in the transaction. The mechanism that the DTC uses to do this is called a two-phase commit protocol. As its name implies, it breaks each distributed transaction into two separate phases called prepare and commit.

The prepare phase

The initial phase of the two-phase commit requires each service that participates in the transaction to ...