An extended transaction to maintain consistency and recovery in multidatabase systems

A complete practical solution to transaction management preserving multidatabase consistency in the presence of multidatabase updates and failures is presented. The approach developed does not require support for the two-phase commit (2PC) protocol in the participating local database management systems (LDBMSs). Furthermore, it does not violate local autonomy; the source code of the LDBMSs is not modified in any way and the multidatabase system (MDBS) does not access or modify any control information of the LDBMS. The principles of the 2PC protocol in the process of global transaction commitment are adopted. The presented method does not rely on any specific concurrency control mechanism for LDBMSs. Consideration is given to global transaction failures due to subtransaction aborts by the LDBMSs and local site crashes. The recovery process is based on undo operations. While a global transaction is in progress, the tables accessed by subtransactions of this transaction at each local site are locked using specially initiated table locks. These locks are stored and maintained in the local database itself as control tables. The approach taken is easy to implement, and its limitations are discussed.