a bug in how the decisions were logged, or due to data corruption on the server), manual intervention may be necessary. Many XA implementations provide an "escape hatch" for transactions to independently decide whether to commit or abort (without waiting to hear from the transaction manager), but this risks violating the atomicity guarantee and is therefore reserved for emergencies. Specification The XA specification describes what a resource manager must do to support transactional access. Resource managers that follow this specification are said to be XA-compliant. The XA specification was based on an interface used in the Tuxedo system developed in the 1980s, but adopted by several systems since then. See also Two-phase commit protocol Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) References External links Distributed Transaction Processing: The XA Specification (see also metadata page) Transaction processing Open Group standards