What is a distributed transaction?

The distributed components of an application will not always be able to complete a task completely isolated. We have already seen how we can use messages to share information between components so that remote components can have the data they need to complete small tasks. Within a simple component, more complex tasks could utilize a transaction to ensure that the entire operation completes atomically.

Let’s talk about local transactions for a moment and why we would want to emulate them as distributed transactions. We use transactions for the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) guarantees they provide us:

• The atomicity guarantee ensures that the group of queries is treated as a single unit – that is, a single interaction with the database – and that they all either succeed together or fail together
• The consistency guarantee ensures that the queries transition the state in the database while...