Global committability in multidatabase systems

Develops a formal basis for research into the reliability aspects of transaction processing in multidatabase systems (MDBSs). We define a new correctness notion called 'global committability' for the correct unilateral commit and the retry recovery of global transactions in an autonomous MDBS environment. This notion makes it easier to ensure the isolation property of global transactions when the retry approach is applied. The formalization work illustrates that the conventional serializability and recoverability notions are not sufficient to specify the correct execution (i.e. isolated execution and recovery) of global transactions when the unilateral commit and the retry recovery are used to ensure the atomicity of global transactions. This work is significant because the unilateral commit and the retry recovery are an attractive complementary means to the undo recovery (whose correct schedule is specified by the conventional recoverability notion) for advanced transaction applications with the characteristics of site autonomy and long-lived execution.