Unilateral commit: a new paradigm for reliable distributed transaction processing

An alternative approach to distributed transaction processing based on the unilateral commit paradigm (UCP) and on persistent transmission is proposed. Instead of executing a unit of work as a single distributed transaction, as in the traditional transaction execution paradigm, opportunities are looked for to execute it as a structured set or a sequence of smaller, possibly single-site atomic transactions. Each such transaction, once executed, is committed independently of other transactions in the task. A method for rigorously maintaining the linkage between the steps is provided for by a persistent transmission mechanism. It is argued that UCP is especially attractive since it relies on a site´s ability to execute conventional flat local transactions and does not require additional capabilities such as the ability to execute nested transactions