How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?

Summary: Systematic characterization of time and message complexity of atomic commit in the common case (failure-free, all-vote-yes) that closes open questions such as synchronous non-blocking bounds. Provides matching optimal protocols and an "indulgent atomic commit" scheme for practical mostly-synchronous systems. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1715
Venue: PODS
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 5.5560093e-05
Overall Rank: 7,736 | 46.93%
DOI: 10.1145/3034786.3034799

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL)
2. Jingjing Wang (EPFL)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{guerraoui_pods17,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '17},
        title = {{How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3034786.3034799},
        doi = {10.1145/3034786.3034799},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Guerraoui, Rachid and Wang, Jingjing},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
208	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024968157

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
47	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.00044503718
57	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040139242
400	Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process	1983	PODS	0.00019173482
480	Nonblocking Commit Protocols	1981	SIGMOD	0.00017789222
2,497	Low-Latency Multi-Datacenter Databases using Replicated Commit	2013	VLDB	8.5020762e-05
3,936	A Knowledge Theoretic Analysis of Atomic Commitment Protocols (Preliminary Report)	1987	PODS	7.0082534e-05
4,319	Minimizing Commit Latency of Transactions in Geo-Replicated Data Stores	2015	SIGMOD	6.7630901e-05
6,162	Increasing the Resilience of Atomic Commit, at No Additional Cost	1995	PODS	5.9533559e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,568	Optimal Termination Protocols for Network Partitioning	1983	PODS
2	7,540	On The Complexity Of Commit Protocols	1985	PODS
3	6,445	Performance Evaluation of a Two-Phase Commit Based Protocol for Distributed Databases	1982	PODS
4	3,936	A Knowledge Theoretic Analysis of Atomic Commitment Protocols (Preliminary Report)	1987	PODS
5	6,983	Ensuring Relaxed Atomicity for Flexible Transactions in Multidatabase Systems	1994	SIGMOD
6	13,159	Commitment In A Partitioned Distributed Database	1988	SIGMOD
7	13,174	Transaction Commitment At Minimal Communication Cost	1987	PODS
8	4,419	Revisiting Commit Processing in Distributed Database Systems	1997	SIGMOD
9	5,292	An Optimistic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transaction Management	1991	SIGMOD
10	4,338	Analysis of Distributed Commit Protocols	1982	SIGMOD