Camelot and Avalon: A Distributed Transaction Facility (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

Workstations running open operating systems and development tools will be the primary environment for transaction processing in the 1990s. People who want to understand the technology for this revolution will need to understand the concepts and techniques described in this book. Camelot and Avalon are landmark systems for reliable distributed transaction processing, showing how transactions can be layered on top of an operating system and integrated with conventional programming languages. Camelot is also one of the first systems based on the client-server model of distributed applications. This is the only complete and detailed presentation of Camelot, including the design decisions, key algorithms used, implementation details, performance characteristics, and relevant material on the Mach operating system and programming tools. Using familiar languages and operating systems (C & C++, UNIX and Mach), Camelot and Avalon provide a complete transaction environment for all uniprocessor and multi-processor applications. This book offers basic concepts with concrete examples from their implementation, and will provide more experienced readers with a way to view transactional remote procedure calls as the foundation of reliable distributed computations.