The Vocabulary of Distributed Transactions

This section assumes some familiarity with distributed transactions. For information, see your transaction server documentation. This section describes some commonly used terms.

Two-Phase Commit

Distributed transactions are managed using two-phase commit. When the work of the transaction is complete, the transaction manager (DTC) asks all the resource managers enlisted in the transaction whether they are ready to commit the transaction. This phase is called preparing to commit.

If all the resource managers respond that they are prepared to commit, DTC sends a commit request to each resource manager, and responds to its client that the transaction is completed. If one or more resource manager does not respond, or responds that it cannot commit the transaction, all the work of the transaction is rolled back across all resource managers.