Consensus on transaction commit

  • Authors:
  • Jim Gray;Leslie Lamport

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, San Francisco, CA;Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

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. The Paxos Commit algorithm runs a Paxos consensus algorithm on the commit/abort decision of each participant to obtain a transaction commit protocol that uses 2F + 1 coordinators and makes progress if at least F + 1 of them are working properly. Paxos Commit has the same stable-storage write delay, and can be implemented to have the same message delay in the fault-free case as Two-Phase Commit, but it uses more messages. The classic Two-Phase Commit algorithm is obtained as the special F = 0 case of the Paxos Commit algorithm.