[lorendsr]

2PC tends to have limited throughput due to the participants needing to hold a lock between the voting and commit phase, and all the participants need to support the protocol. Sagas work across different services and data stores and can have high throughput.

However, if all of the data you need to update is in a single database that supports atomic commits, I'd go with that over sagas.

[mkleczek]

> 2PC tends to have limited throughput due to the participants needing to hold a lock between the voting and commit phase

Scalability depends on lock granularity, what's more...

> Sagas [...] can have high throughput

There is no real difference as sagas in practice implement locking in disguise - take the scenario of flight/hotel/car booking:

Once you book a hotel - this particular resource (a room at a particular time) is effectively locked. Cancelling the booking (because other participants failed in saga) is effectively releasing the lock. The room (resource) is locked for the duration of the whole process anyway (as no other customer can book it during this time).

The downside of sagas is that a programmer is forced to explicitly handle all failure scenarios - which costs development time, is error-prone etc.