Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator

Microsoft® Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) is a distributed transaction facility for Microsoft Windows NT® and Microsoft Windows 95. MS DTC uses proven transaction processing technology: it is robust despite system failures, process failures, and communication failures; it exploits loosely coupled systems to provide scalable performance; and it’s easy to install, configure, and manage. To meet its design objectives, MS DTC:

Lowers the cost of Enterprise computing—MS DTC provides a sophisticated, low cost distributed transaction facility for users of networked commodity-priced PCs and servers.
Simplifies application development—MS DTC transactions greatly simplify the application programmer’s task of preserving consistency, despite failures that can occur when updating application data.
Provides a consistent transaction model—MS DTC supports a variety of resource managers, including relational databases, object-oriented databases, file systems, document storage systems, and message queues.
Enables software development using distributed, object-oriented, software components—MS DTC is based on the OLE Transactions interface standard, which provides a simple, object-oriented application programming interface for initiating and controlling transactions.

With MS DTC version 1.0:

Application programs can reliably update data residing on two or more OLE Transactions-compliant resource managers. The client application may reside on a Windows 95 or Windows NT system, and the resource managers may reside on one or more Windows NT systems.
You can use an OLE Transactions-compliant resource manager with an X/Open-compliant Transaction Processing monitor, such as Encina, TopEnd, and Tuxedo.

MS DTC is not recommended for replicating a database for decision support or high availability. Microsoft recommends that you use the data replication services provided with your relational database application. For more information, see Data Replication for Decision Support.

MS DTC is also not recommended for applications that tolerate data inconsistency. MS DTC is not a cost-effective solution for these types of applications.