Distributed Transactions Manager

What is DTM

DTM is a distributed transaction solution which provides cross-service eventually data consistency. It provides saga, tcc, xa, 2-phase message strategies for a variety of application scenarios. It also supports multiple languages and multiple store engine to form up a transaction as following:

Who's using DTM (partial)

Tencent

Ivydad

Eglass

Features

Extremely easy to adapt
- Support HTTP and gRPC, provide easy-to-use programming interfaces, lower substantially the barrier of getting started with distributed transactions. Newcomers can adapt quickly.
Easy to use
- Relieving developers from worrying about suspension, null compensation, idempotent transaction, and other tricky problems, the framework layer handles them all.
Language-agnostic
- Suit for companies with multiple-language stacks. Easy to write bindings for Go, Python, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and other languages.
Easy to deploy, easy to extend
- DTM depends only on MySQL, easy to deploy, cluster, and scale horizontally.
Support for multiple distributed transaction protocol
- TCC, SAGA, XA, Transactional messages.

DTM vs. others

There is no mature open-source distributed transaction framework for non-Java languages. Mature open-source distributed transaction frameworks for Java language include Ali's Seata, Huawei's ServiceComb-Pack, Jingdong's shardingsphere, himly, tcc-transaction, ByteTCC, and so on, of which Seata is most widely used.

The following is a comparison of the main features of dtm and Seata.

Features	DTM	Seata	Remarks
Supported languages	Golang, Python, PHP, and others	Java	dtm allows easy access from a new language
Exception handling	Sub-transaction barrier	manual	dtm solves idempotent transaction, hanging, null compensation
TCC	✓	✓
XA	✓	✓
AT	suggest XA	✓	AT is similar to XA with better performance but with dirty rollback
SAGA	support concurrency	complicated state-machine mode	dtm's state-machine mode is being planned
Transactional Messaging	✓	✗	dtm provides Transactional Messaging similar to RocketMQ
Multiple DBs in a service	✓	✗
Communication protocols	HTTP, gRPC	Dubbo, no HTTP
Star count			dtm 0.1 is released from 20210604 and under fast development

From the features' comparison above, if your language stack includes languages other than Java, then dtm is the one for you. If your language stack is Java, you can also choose to access dtm and use sub-transaction barrier technology to simplify your business development.

Cook Book

Quick start

run dtm

git clone https://github.com/dtm-labs/dtm && cd dtm
go run main.go

Start the example

git clone https://github.com/dtm-labs/dtmcli-go-sample && cd dtmcli-go-sample
go run main.go

Code

Use

  // business micro-service address
  const qsBusi = "http://localhost:8081/api/busi_saga"
  // The address where DtmServer serves DTM, which is a url
  DtmServer := "http://localhost:36789/api/dtmsvr"
  req := &gin.H{"amount": 30} // micro-service payload
	// DtmServer is the address of DTM micro-service
	saga := dtmcli.NewSaga(DtmServer, dtmcli.MustGenGid(DtmServer)).
		// add a TransOut subtraction，forward operation with url: qsBusi+"/TransOut", reverse compensation operation with url: qsBusi+"/TransOutCom"
		Add(qsBusi+"/TransOut", qsBusi+"/TransOutCom", req).
		// add a TransIn subtraction, forward operation with url: qsBusi+"/TransIn", reverse compensation operation with url: qsBusi+"/TransInCom"
		Add(qsBusi+"/TransIn", qsBusi+"/TransInCom", req)
	// submit the created saga transaction，dtm ensures all subtractions either complete or get revoked
	err := saga.Submit()