Consensus on Transaction Commit
Jim Gray, Leslie Lamport

TL;DR
This paper introduces Paxos Commit, a fault-tolerant consensus-based transaction commit protocol that avoids blocking and improves reliability over the classic Two-Phase Commit by using Paxos consensus.
Contribution
It presents a novel Paxos-based transaction commit protocol that generalizes Two-Phase Commit and ensures progress with fault tolerance.
Findings
Requires 2F + 1 coordinators for fault tolerance
Makes progress if at least F + 1 coordinators are operational
In the fault-free case, has the same delay as Two-Phase Commit
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. Running a Paxos consensus algorithm on the commit/abort decision of each participant yields a transaction commit protocol that uses 2F +1 coordinators and makes progress if at least F +1 of them are working. In the fault-free case, this algorithm requires one extra message delay but has the same stable-storage write delay as Two-Phase Commit. The classic Two-Phase Commit algorithm is obtained as the special F = 0 case of the general Paxos Commit algorithm.
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Cognitive Functions and Memory · Real-Time Systems Scheduling
