What is a “distributed transaction”?

Question

The Wikipedia article for Distributed transaction isn\'t very helpful.

Can you give a high-level description with more details of what a distributed transaction is?

Answer 1

Distributed transactions span multiple physical systems, whereas standard transactions do not. Synchronization amongst the systems becomes a need which traditionally would not exist in a standard transaction.

From your Wikipedia reference...

...a distributed transaction can be seen as a database transaction that must be synchronized (or provide ACID properties) among multiple participating databases which are distributed among different physical locations...