Atomic vs Two Phase

Atomic vs Two Phase

Posted Apr 1, 2004 2:23 UTC (Thu) by stephenjudd (subscriber, #3227)
In reply to: Atomic vs Two Phase by ccyoung
Parent article: The Aberdeen Group looks at free databases

Here's an explanation of two phase commit.

It's pretty important if your transaction depends on a service outside your DBMS. Eg, think of an order process where the order only gets committed if there's authorisation from a third party. Anywhere with mixed legacy systems in the back end, such as your typical bank, probably would like two phase commit in the DB. It's distributed systems 101.

Like anything else, you can implement this in your application code instead, but it's nice when the DB does it for you, because it's harder to do right than you think.

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