Multi-shot distributed transaction commit

• Published in: Distributed computing Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 301 - 318
• Main Authors: Chockler, Gregory, Gotsman, Alexey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.08.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Certification; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Hardware; Computer networks; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Concurrency; Concurrency control; Data storage; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Theory of Computation; Two-phase commit; Transactions; Data replication; Concurrency control; Atomic commit problem; Paxos
• ISSN: 0178-2770; 1432-0452
• DOI: 10.1007/s00446-021-00389-4

Atomic Commit Problem (ACP) is a single-shot agreement problem similar to consensus, meant to model the properties of transaction commit protocols in fault-prone distributed systems. We argue that ACP is too restrictive to capture the complexities of modern transactional data stores, where commit protocols are integrated with concurrency control, and their executions for different transactions are interdependent. As an alternative, we introduce Transaction Certification Service (TCS), a new formal problem that captures safety guarantees of multi-shot transaction commit protocols with integrated concurrency control. TCS is parameterized by a certification function that can be instantiated to support common isolation levels, such as serializability and snapshot isolation. We then derive a provably correct crash-resilient protocol for implementing TCS through successive refinement. Our protocol achieves a better time complexity than mainstream approaches that layer two-phase commit on top of Paxos-style replication.