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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4127–4133Cite as

Three-Phase Commit

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Definition

Three-phase commit (3PC) is a synchronization protocol that ensures global atomicity of distributed transactions while alleviating the blocking aspect of 2PC (two-phase commit) in the events of site failures. That is, 3PC never requires operational sites to wait (i.e., block) until a failed site has recovered.

Historical Background

3PC was one of the first attempts to resolve the blocking aspects of 2PC [1]. The main purpose of the protocol is to allow operational sites to continue transaction processing and reach agreement about the final status of transactions in spite of the presence of site failures. 3PC can tolerate any number of site failures (except for total sites’ failures), assuming a highly reliable network (i.e., a network that never causes operational sites to be partitioned into more than one set of communicating sites, implying a network that never fails).

Foundations

In 2PC, a participant is blockedif it fails to communicate with the coordinator of a...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Skeen D. Non-blocking commit protocols. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1981. p. 133–42.

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  8. Skeen D, Stonebraker M. A formal model of crash recovery in a distributed system. IEEE Trans Softw Eng. 1983;9(3):219–28.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Public Administration, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Yousef J. Al-Houmaily

  2. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    George Samaras

Authors
  1. Yousef J. Al-Houmaily
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  2. George Samaras
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yousef J. Al-Houmaily .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, National Univ. of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kian-Lee Tan

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Al-Houmaily, Y.J., Samaras, G. (2018). Three-Phase Commit. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_714

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