DTtX

dtTx is a protocol and data model designed to coordinate atomic cross-system transactions in distributed computing environments. It provides mechanisms for multiple services and data stores to participate in a single logical transaction, ensuring that updates across different components either all succeed or all fail, thereby preserving consistency in complex cloud-native architectures.

Origin and scope: The concept arose in the early 2020s within the distributed systems community as an evolution of traditional distributed transactions. It emphasizes compatibility with microservices, event-driven architectures, and durable logging, combining ideas from two-phase commit with modern fault-tolerance strategies to reduce coordination overhead while maintaining strong transactional guarantees.

Core architecture: A dtTx deployment centers on a global transaction, identified by a unique global transaction ID, and a transaction coordinator that orchestrates participants. Each participant registers as a branch, performing local updates and returning a vote or status. A durable, append-only transaction log records all decisions for recovery and auditing.

Workflow and failure handling: The typical lifecycle includes begin, prepare, commit or abort. If all participants vote to commit, the coordinator issues a commit; otherwise, it issues an abort. In the face of failures, timeouts, network partitions, and node restarts trigger automatic retries and compensating actions when available.

Adoption and considerations: dtTx is used in systems requiring cross-service consistency, such as multi-database deployments and critical financial or inventory workflows. It introduces latency and complexity and may be avoided where eventual consistency suffices; alternatives include the saga pattern, compensating transactions, or data replication strategies.