A Pragmatic Implementation of e-Transactions

Frolund, Svend ; Guerraoui, Rachid

HP Development Company

关键词: reliability;    fault-tolerance;    transaction processing;    exactly-once;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2000-97

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

Three-tier applications have nice properties, which make them scalable and manageable: clients are thin and servers are stateless. However, it is challenging to implement, or even define, end-to-end reliability for such applications. Furthermore, it is especially hard to make these applications reliable without violating their nice properties . In our previous work, we have identified e-transactions as a desirable and practical end-to-end reliability guarantee for three-tier applications. Essentially, an e-transaction guarantees that the server-side transactional side- effect happens exactly-once, and that the client receives the result of the server-side computation. Thus, e-transactions mask server and database failures relative to the client. We present in this paper a pragmatic implementation of e-transactions that maintains the nice properties of three-tier applications in the special, but very common, case of a single backend database. 13 Pages