Federated transaction management (also known as multidatabase transaction management in the literature) is needed to ensure the consistency of data that is distributed across multiple, largely autonomous, and possibly heterogeneous component databases and accessed by both global and local transactions. While the global atomicity of such transactions can be enforced by using a standardized commit protocol like XA or its CORBA counterpart OTS, global serializability is not self-guaranteed as the underlying component systems may use a variety of potentially incompatible local concurrency control protocols. The problem of how to achieve global serializability, by either constraining the component systems or implementing additional global protocols at the federation level, has been intensively studied in the literature, but did not have much impact on the practical side. A major deficiency of the prior work has been that it focused on the idealized correctness criterion of serializability ...