Consensus on Transaction Commit

The distributed transaction commit problem requires reaching agreement on whether a transaction is committed or aborted. The classic Two-Phase Commit protocol blocks if the coordinator fails. Fault-tolerant consensus algorithms also reach agreement, but do not block whenever any majority of the processes are working. Running a Paxos consensus algorithm on the commit/abort decision of each participant yields a transaction commit protocol that uses 2F +1 coordinators and makes progress if at least F +1 of them are working. In the fault-free case, this algorithm requires one extra message delay but has the same stable-storage write delay as Two-Phase Commit. The classic Two-Phase Commit algorithm is obtained as the special F = 0 case of the general Paxos Commit algorithm.Comment: Original at http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=70

Transaction Management in Distributed Database Systems: The Case of Oracle’s Two-Phase Commit

Distributed database systems (DDBS) pose different problems when accessing distributed and replicated databases. Particularly, access control and transaction management in DDBS require different mechanism to monitor data retrieval and update to databases. Current trends in multi-tier client/server networks make DDBS an appropriated solution to provide access to and control over localized databases. Oracle, as a leading Database Management System (DBMS) vendor employs the two-phase commit technique to maintain consistent state for the database. The objective of this paper is to explain transaction management in DDBS and how Oracle implements this technique. An example is given to demonstrate the step involved in executing the two-phase commit. By using this feature of Oracle, organizations will benefit from the use of DDBS to successfully manage the enterprise data resource

Implementation of the two-phase commit protocol in Thor

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-42).by Andrew Kirmse.M.Eng

Performance evaluation of a prudent two-phase commit protocol

Studies a prudent two-phase commit protocol, which in the presence of failures does not abort a transaction carelessly. Thus system performance is improved

A Byzantine Fault Tolerant Distributed Commit Protocol

In this paper, we present a Byzantine fault tolerant distributed commit protocol for transactions running over untrusted networks. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is enhanced by replicating the coordinator and by running a Byzantine agreement algorithm among the coordinator replicas. Our protocol can tolerate Byzantine faults at the coordinator replicas and a subset of malicious faults at the participants. A decision certificate, which includes a set of registration records and a set of votes from participants, is used to facilitate the coordinator replicas to reach a Byzantine agreement on the outcome of each transaction. The certificate also limits the ways a faulty replica can use towards non-atomic termination of transactions, or semantically incorrect transaction outcomes.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 200

An Alternative Model to Overcoming Two Phase Commit Blocking Problem

In distributed transactions, the atomicity requirement of the atomic commitment protocol should be preserved. The two phased commit protocol algorithm is widely used to ensure that transactions in distributed environment are atomic. However, a main drawback was attributed to the algorithm, which is a blocking problem. The system will get in stuck when participating sites or the coordinator itself crashes. To address this problem a number of algorithms related to 2PC protocol were proposed such as back up coordinator and a technique whereby the algorithm passes through 3PC during failure. However, both algorithms face limitations such as multiple site and backup coordinator failures. Therefore, we proposed an alternative model to overcoming the blocking problem in combined form. The algorithm was simulated using Britonix transaction manager (BTM) using Eclipse IDE and MYSQL. In this paper, we assessed the performance of the alternative model and found that this algorithm handled site and coordinator failures in distributed transactions using hybridization (combination of two algorithms) with minimal communication messages

Coloured Petri Net Model of Two-Phase Commit Protocol With Multiple Participants

In this work the usage of Coloured Petri Net for modeling and simulation of Two Phase Commit protocol with multiple cohorts is presented. Brief overview of Coloured Petri Nets is introduced. Two-Phase Commit protocol is briefly described than introduced as Coloured Petri Net model. By initial marking adaptation a few scenarios for 2PC protocol are presented with the use of the reachability analysis.Розглянуто застосування розфарбовуваних мереж Петрі для побудови моделей та подальшої імітації двофазного протоколу підтвердження розподілених транзакцій - 2PC (Two-phase commit) з багатьма учасниками. Надано опис основних понять розфарбовуваних мереж Петрі, що використовуються, а також дії двофазного протоколу підтвердження транзакцій для більш ніж одного учасника. За допомогою відповідного вибору початкових розміток проаналізовано досяжні стани для різних ситуацій, які можуть виникнути в процесі реалізації розподілених транзакцій із застосуванням протоколу 2PC

Byzantine Fault Tolerant Coordination for Web Services Atomic Transactions

This thesis describes a Byzantine fault tolerant coordination framework for Web services atomic transactions. In the framework, all core services, including transaction activation, registration, completion, and distributed commit, are replicated and protected by Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is extended by a Byzantine fault tolerant version that can tolerate arbitrary faults on the coordinator and the initiator sides, and some types of malicious faults on the participant side. To achieve Byzantine fault tolerance in an efficient manner, and to limit the types of malicious behaviors of the coordinator, a novel decision certificate is introduced. The decision certificate includes a signed copy of the participants\u27 vote records, and it is piggybacked with all decision notifications to the participants for each participant to verify the legitimacy of the decision. The Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms, together with the extended two-phase commit protocol, have been incorporated into an open-source framework supporting the standard Web services atomic transactions specification. Performance characterizations of the framework show that the implementation is fairly efficient. Such a Byzantine fault tolerant coordination framework can be useful for many transactional Web services that require a high degree of security and dependabilit