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

I have tried to show the distributed transactions details in this post Performance tuning of Distributed ( XA ) transaction - How?

The good data for distributed transaction is the data that has very high requirement for Consistency. Usually this is money or something else that we can never have stale data. I usually define two categories Live data and data that there is no immediate need for correctness/consistency.

Now the second part of the question about Dynamo, Bigtable, HBase, or Cassandra.

You can not draw a paralel in between NOSQL databases and distributed transactions. The very existance of this class of databases is justified as a means of avoiding distributed transactions. Distributed transaction is centered all around consistency. That is quite the opposite with the NOSQL storage which is centered around Availability and Partitioning.

The usual transactional model used in such databases is Eventual Consistency.