The preservation of local autonomy and the atomic commitment of global Lransactions present conllieting exigencies to the design of mullidalabase transaction management systems. In this paper, we investigate a forward recovery approach to the atomic commitment of global transactions while al the same lime preserving local autonomy. A theoretical basis for the application of forward recovery to the atomic commitment of global transaclions is developed. In particular, we examine the effect on

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... ic commitment of the intrinsic semantics of global transactions, as manifestcd in value dependency rela.tionships. The atomicity of a global transaclion is thus ensured through a controlled commilment order ofils global subtransactions, while its a.bortcd global subtransactions are rctried. A global atomic commitment protocol is grounded upon the proposed theory.