Real-time transaction scheduling in database systems

A database system supporting a real-time application, which can be called “a real-time database system (RTDBS)”, has to provide real-time information to the executing transactions. Each RTDB transaction is associated with a timing constraint, usually in the form of a deadline. Efficient resource scheduling algorithms and concurrency control protocols are required to schedule the transactions so as to satisfy both timing constraints and data consistency requirements. In this paper, † † An earlier version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of ACM Computer Science Conference '92. we concentrate on the concurrency control problem in RTDBSs. Our work has two basic goals: real-time performance evaluation of existing concurrency control approaches in RTDBSs, and proposing new concurrency control protocols with improved performance. One of the new protocols is locking-based, and it prevents the priority inversion problem ‡ by scheduling the data lock requests based on prioritizing data items. The second new protocol extends the basic timestamp-ordering method by involving real-time priorities of transactions in the timestamp assignment procedure. Performance of the protocols is evaluated through simulations by using a detailed model of a single-site RTDBS. The relative performance of the protocols is examined as a function of transaction load, data contention (which is determined by a number of system parameters) and resource contention. The protocols are also tested under various real-time transaction processing environments. The performance of the proposed protocols appears to be good, especially under conditions of high transaction load and high data contention.