MIT OpenCourseWare, 6.830 Database Systems, Fall 2010, Prof. Carlo Curino and Prof. Michael Stonebraker. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Reorganized into modules by Sequence 106. No lecture videos were published for this course; each session is notes plus readings. Source · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Module 6 · Column stores, distributed and parallel databases · Activity 22 of 32
Lecture 16: Distributed transactions
Lecture notes · Carlo Curino
Readings and discussion questions
We will continue our discussion of parallel and distributed query processing. You should read:
Mohan, C., B. Lindsay, and R. Obermarck. “Transaction Management in the R* Distributed Database Management Systems.” ACM Transactions on Database Systems 11, no. 4 (1986): 378-396. In the Red Book.
This paper discusses distributed transactions, addressing the problem of providing ACID-style semantics in a shared nothing environment.
As you read the paper, consider the following questions:
- In the “R*” paper, how does the two phase commit (2PC) protocol work? What problem does it solve? What are the costs of using it?
- What is the significance of the Presumed Abort/Presumed Commit variants of 2PC? How do they reduce the overhead of 2PC? When should you choose one over the other?
Assigned by MIT for this session; links go to the papers where MIT linked them. Books: Readings in Database Systems (the Red Book, 4th ed.) and Ramakrishnan & Gehrke.