An efficient fault-tolerant decentralized commit protocol for single site failure

To maintain consistency on a distributed database system, a commit protocol is often employed to ensure that either all the sub-transactions of a transaction commit or all abort. Special care needs to be taken to ensure the correct functioning of a commit protocol in the face of node failures during the execution of the protocol. A protocol is said to be fault-tolerant if it properly commits or aborts, even if nodes fail.In this paper, we present a fault tolerant decentralized commit protocol which is message optimal in the absence of failures. Furthermore, the protocol (FTDCP) ensures that all sites can achieve a consistent final decision by at most 4 extra messages in the single site failure situation.