On the impossibility of atomic commitment in multidatabase systems

Examines the problem of performing the atomic commitment of global transactions in multi-database system environments, where autonomous local database systems are integrated into a global database system. It is shown, that if the autonomy of the local database systems is preserved, it is impossible to perform atomic commitment in general, even under the assumption that there are no system failures. It is also shown that even when it is assumed that all local database systems use strict two phase locking (an assumption useful for performing global concurrency control), atomic commitment is impossible if even a single system failure can occur.<
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