On structural features of global transactions in multidatabase systems

Supporting the isolation and atomicity of global transactions in multidatabase systems has become an increasingly difficult task. Local autonomy requires that the maintenance of the isolation and atomicity of global transactions must hold when their execution is interleaved with local transactions. The paper proposes the utilization of both the syntactic and semantic characteristics of global transactions to formulate such a condition. An enriched combination of two theories, hybrid serializability and global committability, is presented as a vehicle for the maintenance of the isolation and atomicity of global transactions. The authors then explore the structural features of global transactions which provide the necessary conditions for supporting the theory. The present findings represent a new research direction in the management of global transactions. Instead of seeking restrictions on local transaction management systems, they show that local autonomy may be well preserved by placing conditions on global transactions to accommodate the autonomous local environment