Participant Intention - to - Commit Ack

The implicit yes{vote commit protocol (IYV), proposed for future gigabit{networked distributed databases, reduces the time required to commit a distributed transaction at the expense of independent recovery of failed participant sites. In this paper, we propose a novel coordination scheme for IYV that reduces the window of vulnerability to blocking and minimizes the time required for the sites to become operational after a failure. The new scheme combines the delegation of commitment technique with a timestamp synchronization mechanism. Although this new scheme incurs extra coordination messages and log writes, it enhances the performance of IYV during recovery in the presence of less reliable sites while still maintaining the cost of commit processing during normal processing below that of two-phase commit and its other well known variants.