Transaction coordinator
A transaction coordinator is a component that coordinates distributed transaction participants and directs them to commit or roll back as a unit.
Think Distributed Systems
A component that receives requests, assigns them an order, and distributes the ordered requests to other components.
- How it is used
- Coordinates request ordering and distributed transaction decisions across components that cannot reliably observe one another.
- How deep it goes
- Defines ordering and two-phase commit operationally, then distinguishes safety from liveness under coordinator and participant failures.
- Examples
- Uses numbered +2 and ×2 requests, Prepare and Commit phases, persistent logs, timeouts, and coordinator-failure scenarios.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate how coordination establishes order, reaches atomic decisions, and can block when the coordinator fails.
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Apache Kafka in Action
A transaction coordinator is the Kafka broker component that coordinates a transaction and writes markers recording its commit or abort outcome.
- How it is used
- Coordinates atomic Kafka writes across multiple partitions and records whether each transaction commits or aborts.
- How deep it goes
- Explains partition registration, tentative writes, outcome markers, crash guarantees, and broker-side read_committed filtering.
- Examples
- Uses a flight-and-hotel reservation analogy and a message-flow figure covering unfinished, committed, and aborted transactions.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate transaction reliability and understand how Kafka consumers receive only committed records.
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Related concepts
- Kafka brokerkind of · A Kafka broker is a server process in an Apache Kafka cluster that stores records and handles producer, consumer, and other client requests.
- distributed transactionused by · A distributed transaction is a unit of work whose operations span multiple resources or systems and whose outcome is coordinated across them.
- transactional producerused by · A transactional producer is a Kafka producer mode that publishes records to multiple topics as one atomic transaction, committing all records together or none of them.
- race conditionaddresses · A race condition is a concurrency defect in which program behavior or results depend on the relative timing or ordering of interacting operations.
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