DCOM Explained
by Rosemary Rock-Evans
Digital Press
ISBN: 1555582168   Pub Date: 09/01/98

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In Summary

Microsoft Transaction Server is a very useful additional service within DCOM. We can see that the way the Transaction manager works is extremely well thought through and that useful additional services have been added to help DCOM become better able to support high-volume distributed transaction processing systems.

In fact, it is MTS that Microsoft is using to try to make MS SQL Server scale up to support larger volumes of data and more users. In this case, the database is distributed across many Windows NT servers, and MTS is used to control the distributed update using two-phase commit.

When Microsoft talks about scalability, this is what it means—it achieves scalability by splitting the data across machines and handling the distributed updates using MTS. But it is still the early days when it comes to support for other DBMSs, and if, like many other companies, you have data in Ingres, Sybase, Informix, or DBMSs, then you are going to have to wait a little while before you are supported. Furthermore, if you are running them on platforms other than Windows NT you are also going to have to wait. MTS runs on Windows NT.


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