Distributed transaction is a transaction that spans multiple nodes or services in a distributed system, requiring coordination to ensure all participants agree to commit or abort the transaction. Despite the added complexity and potential performance impact, distributed transactions are crucial for maintaining data consistency across services, especially in microservice architectures or multi-region deployments.

How to use it in a sentence

• "We'll need to use a distributed transaction to update the inventory and shopping cart services atomically," Alice said, rolling her eyes at the thought of dealing with yet another two-phase commit protocol.

• Bob sighed heavily as he reviewed the architecture diagram, realizing that implementing distributed transactions across their new microservices would be about as fun as a root canal without anesthesia.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Transactions: Myths, Surprises and Opportunities by Martin Kleppmann provides an excellent overview of the evolving landscape of transactions, addressing key questions about ACID, isolation levels, and modern distributed transaction algorithms.

• Transactions in Stream Processing by Martin Kleppmann explores how transactional guarantees can be maintained beyond a single database, such as in stream processing systems.

• Verifying Distributed Systems with Isabelle/HOL by Martin Kleppmann discusses the importance of formal correctness proofs for distributed algorithms and demonstrates how to model and verify distributed systems using Isabelle/HOL.

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