A Highly Available Log Service for Transaction Termination

Distributed transaction processing hinges on enforcing agreement among the involved resource managers on whether to commit or abort transactions (atomicity) and on making their updates permanent (durability). This paper introduces a log service which abstracts these tasks. The service logs commit and abort votes as well as the updates performed by each resource manager. Based on the votes, the log service outputs the transaction's outcome. The service also totally orders non-concurrent transactions and makes the sequence of updates performed by each resource manager available as a means to consistently recover resource managers without relying on their local state. Besides the specification, we overview two highly available implementations of this service and present an experimental performance evaluation.