Optimistic concurrency control protocol for real-time databases

In recent years, the use of optimistic schemes for concurrency control in real-time database systems (RTDBS) has received more and more attention. Different real-time optimistic protocols have been proposed. They incorporate different priority conflict resolution methods into the validation phase of a transaction to give preferences for the commitment of higher priority transactions. However, some of these protocols suffer from the problem of heavy restart overheads. Restarting near-to-complete transactions greatly increases the system workload and the deadline missing probability of the transactions (Haritsa et al., 1992; Huang, 1991). In order to reduce the number of restarts, dynamic adjustment of the serialization order of the conflicting transactions has been suggested using timestamp intervals to record the transactions' serialization constraints (Lee and Son, 1993a, 1993b; Lee, 1994). However, these kinds of protocols have the problem of heavy implementation overheads as the timestamp intervals have to be checked and updated in case of any conflict even though the transactions are still in their read phases (Lee, 1994). In this paper, we propose a new real-time optimistic protocol which employs the notion of dynamic adjustment of serialization order by backward-adjusting the non-serious conflicting transactions before the committing transactions so that many restarts can be eliminated. In the protocol, the overhead to support dynamic adjustment of serialization order is small. All checking is performed at the validation test of a transaction so as to provide more freedom for the adjustments. No conflict and serialization constraints have to be recorded during the read phase of a transaction. Performance studies of the proposed protocol by varying different parameters indicate that it outperforms other protocols.