Internal Consistency of a Distributed Transaction System with Orphan Detection

Abstract

This thesis defines a property called "view-serializability", which formalizes internal consistency for a system of nested atomic transactions. Internal consistency is a stronger condition than the usual notion of data base consistency, because it takes into account the views of transactions which will never commit. In a distributed system, local aborts of remote subactions and crashes of nodes can generate orphans: active actions which are descendants of actions that have aborted or are guaranteed to abort.