A Single Phase Distributed Commit Protocol for Main Memory Database Systems

Distributed database systems need commit processing so that transactions executing on them still preserve the ACID property. With the advance of main memory database systems which become possible due to dropping price and increasing capacity of the RAM and CPU, the database processing speed has been incresed in one order of magnitude. However, when it comes to distributed commit processing, it is still very slow since disk logging has to precede the transaction commit where the database access does not incur any disk access at all in the case of main memory databases. In this paper, we re-evaluate the various distributed commit protocols and come up with a single phase distributed commit protocol suitable for the distributed main memory database systems. Our simulation study confirms that the new protocol greatly reduces the time it takes to commit distributed transactions without any consistency problem.