Revisiting commit processing in distributed database systems

  • Authors:
  • Ramesh Gupta;Jayant Haritsa;Krithi Ramamritham

  • Affiliations:
  • Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India;Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India;Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

  • Venue:
  • SIGMOD '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
  • Year:
  • 1997

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.02

Visualization

Abstract

A significant body of literature is available on distributed transaction commit protocols. Surprisingly, however, the relative merits of these protocols have not been studied with respect to their quantitative impact on transaction processing performance. In this paper, using a detailed simulation model of a distributed database system, we profile the transaction throughput performance of a representative set of commit protocols. A new commit protocol, OPT, that allows transactions to “optimistically” borrow uncommitted data in a controlled manner is also proposed and evaluated. The new protocol is easy to implement and incorporate in current systems, and can coexist with most other optimizations proposed earlier. For example, OPT can be combined with current industry standard protocols such as Presumed Commit and Presumed Abort.The experimental results show that distributed commit processing can have considerably more influence than distributed data processing on the throughput performance and that the choice of commit protocol clearly affects the magnitude of this influence. Among the protocols evaluated, the new optimistic commit protocol provides the best transaction throughput performance for a variety of workloads and system configurations. In fact, OPT's peak throughput is often close to the upper bound on achievable performance. Even more interestingly, a three-phase (i.e., non-blocking) version of OPT provides better peak throughput performance than all of the standard two-phase (i.e., blocking protocols evaluated in our study.