Strict Serializable Multidatabase Certification with Out-of-Order Updates

Multi-phase atomic commitment protocols require long-lived resource locks on the participants and introduce blocking behaviour at the coordinator. They are also pessimistic in nature, preventing reads from executing concurrently with writes. Despite their known shortfalls, multi-phase protocols are the mainstay of transactional integration between autonomous, federated systems. This paper presents a novel atomic commitment protocol, STRIDE (Speculative Transactions in Decentralised Environments), that offers strict serializable certification of distributed transactions across autonomous, replicated sites. The protocol follows the principles of optimistic concurrency control, operating on the premise that conflicting transactions are infrequent. When they do occur, conflicting transactions are identified through antidependency testing on the certifier, which may be replicated for performance and availability. The majority of transactions can be certified entirely in memory. Unlike its multi-phase counterparts, STRIDE is nonblocking, decentralised and does not mandate the use of long-lived resource locks on the participants. It also offers a flexible isolation model for read-only transactions, which can be served directly from the participant sites without undergoing certification. Also, update transactions are Φ-serializable, making the certifier immune to the recently disclosed logical timestamp skew anomaly.