Abstract
We first encountered the transactional execution model in Chap. 7, in conjunction with client/server architectures. As noted at that time, the model draws on a series of assumptions to arrive at a style of computing that is especially well matched to the needs of applications operating on databases. In this chapter we consider some of the details that Chap. 7 did not cover: notably the issues involved in implementing transactional storage mechanisms and the problems that occur when transactional architectures are extended to encompass transactional access to distributed objects in a reliable distributed system.
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Notes
- 1.
One can imagine doing a multicast by reading the view of the group and then writing to the group members and updating the view of the group by writing to the group view. Such a transactional implementation of virtual synchrony would address some aspects of the model, such as view synchronous addressing, although it would not deal with others, such as the ordered gap-freedom requirement (Chap. 12). More to the point, it would result in an extremely inefficient style of distributed computing, because every multicast to a process group would now require a database update. The analogy, then, is useful because it suggests that the fundamental approaches are closely related and differ more at the level of how one engineers such systems to maximize performance than in any more basic way. However, it is not an architecture one would want to implement!
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Birman, K.P. (2012). Transactional Systems. In: Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_20
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