Abstract

Several design principles necessary to build high performance and reliable distributed database systems have evolved from conceptual research, prototype implementations, and experimentation during the eighties. This paper focuses on the important aspects of transaction processing, including: communication, concurrency, atomicity, replication, and recovery as they apply to distributed systems. Implementation of these in eleven experimental and commercial distributed systems are briefly presented. Details of atwelfth system called RAID that has been implemented by us are included to show our design and implementation strategies. The relationship between database and operating systems is discussed along with the desirable features in communication software for reliable processing. This material has been presented to demonstrate the practicality of certain successful design and implementation choices so as to benefit those who have the responsibility for making distributed systems work.

Citations