How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?
Rachid Guerraoui, Jingjing Wang · 2017
The atomic commit problem lies at the heart of distributed database systems. The problem consists for a set of processes (database nodes) to agree on whether to commit or abort a transaction (agreement property). The commit decision can only be taken if all processes are initially willing to commit the transaction, and this decision must be taken if all processes are willing to commit and there is no failure (validity property). An atomic commit protocol is said to be non-blocking if every correct process (a database node that does not fail) eventually reaches a decision (commit or abort) even if there are failures elsewhere in the distributed database system (termination property).