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.

Database 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 which are distributed among different physical locations. The isolation property (the I of ACID) poses a special challenge for multi database transactions, since the (global) serializability property could be violated, even if each database provides it (see also global serializability). In practice most commercial database systems use strong strict two phase locking (SS2PL) for concurrency control, which ensures global serializability, if all the participating databases employ it. (see also commitment ordering for multidatabases.)

A common algorithm for ensuring correct completion of a distributed transaction is the two-phase commit (2PC). This algorithm is usually applied for updates able to commit in a short period of time, ranging from couple of milliseconds to couple of minutes.

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