Non-blocking one-phase commit made possible for distributed transactions over replicated data

Distributed transaction can enable not only large-scale transacting business in highly scalable datastores, but also fast information extraction from big data through materialized view maintenance and incremental processing. Atomic commitment is key to the correctness of transaction processing. While two-phase commit (2PC) is widely used for distributed transaction commitment even in modern large-scale datastores, it is costly in performance. Even though variants of 2PC can improve performance, they are blocking on server failures, impairing data availability. Existent non-blocking atomic commitment protocols are too costly for practical usage. This work presents Pronto, a non-blocking one-phase commit protocol for distributed transactions over replicated data. Pronto removes the prepare phase of 2PC, reducing communication and logging costs. Without transaction client failure, Pronto can commit a transaction in one communication roundtrip; and, client failures cannot block transaction processing. Pronto can also tolerate server failures. Pronto is compared to state-of-art commitment protocols. Pronto outperforms other commitment protocols in workloads with varying numbers of participants. When a transaction has many participants, Pronto can commit in one fifth of the time 2PC does.