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A comparison of the Byzantine Agreement problem and the Transaction Commit Problem

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Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 448))

Abstract

Transaction Commit algorithms and Byzantine Agreement algorithms solve the problem of multiple processes reaching agreement in the presence of process and message failures. This paper summarizes the computation and fault models of these two kinds of agreement and discusses the differences between them. In particular, it explains that Byzantine Agreement is rarely used in practice because it involves significantly more hardware and messages, yet does not give predictable behavior if there are more than a few faults.

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6. References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tandem Computers, Cupertino, CA., USA

    Jim Gray

Authors
  1. Jim Gray
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Editor information

Barbara Simons Alfred Spector

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© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gray, J. (1990). A comparison of the Byzantine Agreement problem and the Transaction Commit Problem. In: Simons, B., Spector, A. (eds) Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 448. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042322

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042322

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-97385-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-34812-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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