An atomic commit protocol for gigabit-networked distributed database systems

In the near future, different database sites will be interconnected via gigabit networks, forming a very powerful distributed database system. In such an environment, the propagation latency will be the dominant component of the overall communication cost while the migration of large amounts of data will not pose a problem. Furthermore, computer systems are expected to become even more reliable than todayʹs systems with long mean time between failures and short mean time to repair. In this paper, we present implicit yes-vote (IYV), a one-phase atomic commit protocol, that exploits these new domain characteristics to minimize the cost of distributed transaction commitment. IYV eliminates the explicit voting phase of the two-phase commit protocol, hence reducing the number of sequential phases of message passing during normal processing. In the case of a participantʹs site failure, IYV supports the option of forward recovery by enabling partially executed transactions that are still active in the system to resume their execution when the failed participant is recovered.