Jerry, first of all, I don't know. But I do have a few thoughts.
First of all, why do you consider this thing they want you to help
build to be a "network layer"?
It sounds like what you need is some kind of ACID-compliant RPC
interface. Maybe you can call that a "network layer", but it sounds
more like an application protocol to me.
Gray
and Reuter's book
Transaction Processing
(TP) talks a fair amount about distributed transactions and
transaction monitors.
Unfortunatley, TP can be kind of hard to understand, because
all its examples discuss really old mainframe software like IMS (a
hierarchal database from IBM), CICS (a transaction processing monitor
from IBM), and LU6.2 (an IBM de facto standard which "defines a
protocol to invoke remote transactional servers"). I'd never even
heard of most of those before reading the book. We are
talking some truly ancient software here. For example:
IMS is the dominant database and data communications system in use
today [1992] - it has most of the data. It began in the late 1960s as
an inventory tracking system for the U.S. moon landing effort.
[...]
Today, the typical IMS system has thousands of terminals distributed
around the world, driving a large multiprocessor system with a
disk-based database in the 100 GB range. There are only about 10,000
such systems, but they form the core transactions processsing systems
of virtually all large corporations.
Links in TP back to the familiar RDBMS-oriented world of Oracle
and PostgreSQL are slim to nonexistant. For example, DB2 is mentioned
only in the context of IMS ("DB2 is IBM's implementation of SQL on its
mainframes. It acts as a resource manager for either IMS, CICS, or
porgrams running without any transaction monitor.") And Oracle is
mentioned only in a single sentence in, in the discussion of sequence
numbers.
Interestingly, although this has nothing to do with the topic at hand,
TP also notes that Optimistic Locking via Timestamps - which I
think is what Oracle and PostgreSQL do - is merely a degenerate and
inferior version of "Field Calls":
One of the intersting things about locking exotics is the vast
literature. It is possible for experts to be completely ignorant of
some major branch of the field. Optimistic schemes are an
example. They were invented five years after field calls were being
sold on the street and, in fact, are less general than field calls.
Optimistic methods differ from field calls in only the following:
[...]
These are rather degenerate predicates and transforms.
Anyway, there must be other ways to fulfill your requirement, but I
think what you probably want is a Transactional (ACID compliant)
Remote Procedure Call interface. What all the (potentially scary)
design implications of that are, or what the proper way to go about
building such a thing is, I have no idea...
