A Quorum-Based Commit Protocol

Abstract

Herein, we propose a commit protocol and an associated recovery protocol that is resilient to site failures, lost messages, and network partitioning. The protocols do not require that a failure be correctly identified or even detected. The only potential effect of undetected failures is a degradation in performance. The protocols use a weighted voting scheme that supports an arbitrary degree of data replication (including none) and allows unilaterally aborts by any site. This last property facilitates the integration of these protocols with concurrency control protocols. Both protocols are centralized protocols with low message overhead.