The need for distributed asynchronous transactions

The theme of the paper is to promote research on asynchronous transactions. We discuss our experience of executing synchronous transactions on a large distributed production system in The Boeing Company. Due to the poor performance of synchronous transactions in our environment, it motivated the exploration of asynchronous transactions as an alternate solution. This paper presents the requirements and benefits/limitations of asynchronous transactions. Open issues related to large scale deployments of asynchronous transactions are also discussed.