Design and performance of an assertional concurrency control system

摘要

Serializability has been widely accepted as the correctness criterion for databases subject to concurrent access. Serializable execution is generally implemented using a two phase locking algorithm that locks items in the database to delay transactions that care in danger of performing in a nonserializable fashion. Such delays are unacceptable in high performance database systems and in systems supporting long running transactions. A number of models have been proposed in which transactions are decomposed into smaller, atomic, interleavable steps. A shortcoming of much of this work is that little guidance is provided as to how transactions should be decomposed and what interleavings preserve correct execution. We previously proposed a new correctness criterion, weaker than serializability, that guarantees that each transaction satisfies its specification (A. Bernstein and P. Lewis, 1996). Based on that correctness criterion, we have designed and implemented a new concurrency control. Experiments using the new concurrency control demonstrate significant improvement in performance when lock contention is high.