Nothing Rolls Back: Integrating Enterprise Systems Without Distributed Transactions
The message was delivered and the order was never shipped. Both statements can be true at once, and only one of them is what the business asked for.
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Two-Phase Commit
A prepared transaction keeps its locks until it is told the answer. A recovered coordinator replays its decision; until then the rows stay held.
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Compensating Transaction
Cancel the reservation, do not put the number back. Between the booking and the cancellation, other people booked too.
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Saga
A rollback makes it as though nothing happened. A saga makes a correcting entry and leaves everyone who already read the intermediate state as they were.
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Commit Wait
A transaction pauses until its timestamp is safely in the past — buying a correct global order with a few milliseconds of deliberate delay.
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TrueTime
TrueTime returns an interval, not an instant — turning clock uncertainty into a bounded number a system can reason about rather than assume away.