A reliable global atomic commitment protocol for distributed multidatabase systems

Abstract

Many works on multidatabase transaction processing have been made in the past with the assumption of the absence of failures. This is because it has been shown that correct executions of multidatabase transactions cannot be achieved in the presence of failures without certain tradeoffs. In this paper, we first review the problems of preserving the global atomicity of multidatabase transactions in the presence of failures, while preserving local autonomy. Then, we propose a reliable global atomic commitment protocol that solves those problems. We show that the proposed protocol is correct and guarantees the global atomicity. We also present a practical approach that allows easy integration of existing local database systems into our multidatabase system environment. The most elegant feature of our protocol is that it guarantees global atomicity, even in the presence of failures, while the protocol preserves maximal local autonomy, and does not place any restriction on the multidatabase transactions that are often assumed in the literature.