Transaction Routing for Distributed OLTP Systems: Survey and Recent Results

Workloads in distributed database applications consist of queries and transactions. In order to address performance requirements, distributed transaction processing systems have to deal with two related issues: transaction routing and scheduling. Due to the distribution of data objects among nodes and the access cost incurred by remote accesses, efficient transaction routing is an important consideration for overall system performance. Another important consideration is workflow scheduling and routing. Workflows are complex units of work consisting of multiple, possibly interdependent, transactions. In this survey, we discuss a number of different transaction routing mechanisms and their performance.