Distributed database systems require a commit process to preserve the ACID property of transactions executed on a number of system sites. With the appearance of main memory database system, the database processing time has been reduced in the order of magnitude, since the database access does not incur any disk access at all. However, when it comes to distributed main memory database systems, the distributed commit process is still very slow since the disk logging at several sites has to precede the transaction commit. In this paper, we re-evaluate various distributed commit protocols and come up with a causal commit protocol suitable for distributed main memory database systems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed commit protocol, extensive simulation study has been performed. The simulation results confirm that the new protocol greatly reduces the time to commit the distributed transactions without any consistency problem.

In this paper, an effective index structure for dynamic main memory database systems, which we call the T2-tree, is presented. A notion of a thread pointer is introduced to overcome some of the limitations of the T-tree and the T*-tree. There are several advantages to this structure. First, the T2-tree reduces the number of rotate operations and the overhead required for balancing the tree by restraining new node creation and deletion. Second, the T2-tree shows good performance for sequential search of range queries as these requests can be effectively handled using the successor pointer. Finally, the T2-tree allows for higher space utilization amplicating the aforementioned benefits. These advantages are obtained with minimal changes to the existing T-tree structure. Experimental studies showing evidence of the benefits of the T2-tree are also presented.