Best-Effort One-Phase Commit and the Dual-Write Problem
Distributed applications frequently need to coordinate operations across multiple transactional resources. A service might update a database and acknowledge a message, or persist a record and invoke a remote API. The challenge is that these operations are independent. A successful database commit does not guarantee that a message acknowledgement or remote API call will succeed. One commonly adopted strategy is best-effort one-phase commit (1PC). Rather than introducing a distributed transaction coordinator, it relies on careful transaction ordering and idempotent processing to reduce the risk of inconsistent outcomes. ...