A Knowledge Theoretic Analysis of Atomic Commitment Protocols (Preliminary Report)

Summary: Apply logic-of-knowledge to characterize atomic-commit protocols by the minimal knowledge required to decide commit; show 2PC is knowledge-optimal among all AC protocols and 3PC is optimal among non-blocking ACs. Prove no non-blocking AC can tolerate communication failures and derive a lower bound on messages needed to commit. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 784
Venue: PODS
Year: 1987
Pagerank: 7.0082534e-05
Overall Rank: 3,936 | 73.00%
DOI: 10.1145/28659.28672

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Vassos Hadzilacos (University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{hadzilacos_pods87,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '87},
        title = {{A Knowledge Theoretic Analysis of Atomic Commitment Protocols (Preliminary Report)}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28659.28672},
        doi = {10.1145/28659.28672},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Hadzilacos, Vassos},
        year = {1987}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,575	The Principle of Commitment Ordering, or Guaranteeing Serializability in a Heterogeneous Environment of Multiple Autonomous Resource Managers Using Atomic Commitment	1992	VLDB	6.167191e-05
7,736	How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?	2017	PODS	5.5560093e-05
9,937	Extended Commitment Ordering or Guaranteeing Global Serializability by Applying Commitment Order Selectively to Global Transactions	1993	PODS	5.1955087e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,983	Ensuring Relaxed Atomicity for Flexible Transactions in Multidatabase Systems	1994	SIGMOD
2	6,445	Performance Evaluation of a Two-Phase Commit Based Protocol for Distributed Databases	1982	PODS
3	7,540	On The Complexity Of Commit Protocols	1985	PODS
4	13,174	Transaction Commitment At Minimal Communication Cost	1987	PODS
5	13,159	Commitment In A Partitioned Distributed Database	1988	SIGMOD
6	6,162	Increasing the Resilience of Atomic Commit, at No Additional Cost	1995	PODS
7	5,292	An Optimistic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transaction Management	1991	SIGMOD
8	12,899	Atomicity with Incompatible Presumptions	1999	PODS
9	4,338	Analysis of Distributed Commit Protocols	1982	SIGMOD
10	7,736	How Fast can a Distributed Transaction Commit?	2017	PODS