Decentralized transaction management in multidatabase systems

Abstract

A multidatabase system consists of several heterogeneous local database systems. Most studies of multidatabase transaction management are concerned with the centralized transaction management in which there is only one coordinator. All global transactions are submitted to the coordinator site, and thus it can be overloaded. If the coordinator site fails, the multidatabase systems cannot serve any global transactions. In decentralized transaction management, since the site to which a global transaction is submitted becomes its coordinator, the load is naturally balanced and the multidatabase system is gradually degraded even though a coordinator site fails. This paper proposes a decentralized transaction management algorithm which guarantees global serializability and local autonomy.