Transactional concurrency control for resource constrained applications

PhD ThesisTransactions have long been used as a mechanism for ensuring the consistency of databases. Databases, and associated transactional approaches, have always been an active area of research as different application domains and computing architectures have placed ever more elaborate requirements on shared data access. As transactions typically provide consistency at the expense of timeliness (abort/retry) and resource (duplicate shared data and locking), there has been substantial efforts to limit these two aspects of transactions while still satisfying application requirements. In environments where clients are geographically distant from a database the consistency/performance trade-off becomes acute as any retrieval of data over a network is not only expensive, but relatively slow compared to co-located client/database systems. Furthermore, for battery powered clients the increased overhead of transactions can also be viewed as a significant power overhead. However, for all their drawbacks transactions do provide the data consistency that is a requirement for many application types. In this Thesis we explore the solution space related to timely transactional systems for remote clients and centralised databases with a focus on providing a solution, that, when compared to other's work in this domain: (a) maintains consistency; (b) lowers latency; (c) improves throughput. To achieve this we revisit a technique first developed to decrease disk access times via local caching of state (for aborted transactions) to tackle the problems prevalent in real-time databases. We demonstrate that such a technique (rerun) allows a significant change in the typical structure of a transaction (one never before considered, even in rerun systems). Such a change itself brings significant performance success not only in the traditional rerun local database solution space, but also in the distributed solution space. A byproduct of our improvements also, one can argue, brings about a "greener" solution as less time coupled with improved throughput affords improved battery life for mobile devices

Consistency in a Partitioned Network: A Survey

Recently, several strategies for transaction processing in partitioned distributed database systems with replicated data have been proposed. We survey these strategies in light of the competing goals of maintaining correctness and achieving high availability. Extensions and combinations are then discussed, and guidelines for the selection of a strategy for a particular application are presented

A Survey of Traditional and Practical Concurrency Control in Relational Database Management Systems

Traditionally, database theory has focused on concepts such as atomicity and serializability, asserting that concurrent transaction management must enable correctness above all else. Textbooks and academic journals detail a vision of unbounded rationality, where reduced throughput because of concurrency protocols is not of tremendous concern. This thesis seeks to survey the traditional basis for concurrency in relational database management systems and contrast that with actual practice. SQL-92, the current standard for concurrency in relational database management systems has defined isolation, or allowable concurrency levels, and these are examined. Some ways in which DB2, a popular database, interprets these levels and finesses extra concurrency through performance enhancement are detailed. SQL-92 standardizes de facto relational database management systems features. Given this and a superabundance of articles in professional journals detailing steps for fine-tuning transaction concurrency, the expansion of performance tuning seems bright, even at the expense of serializabilty. Are the practical changes wrought by non-academic professionals killing traditional database concurrency ideals? Not really. Reasoned changes for performance gains advocate compromise, using complex concurrency controls when necessary for the job at hand and relaxing standards otherwise. The idea of relational database management systems is only twenty years old, and standards are still evolving. Is there still an interplay between tradition and practice? Of course. Current practice uses tradition pragmatically, not idealistically. Academic ideas help drive the systems available for use, and perhaps current practice now will help academic ideas define concurrency control concepts for relational database management systems

Database recovery

Recovery techniques are an important aspect of database systems. They are essential to ensure that data integrity is maintained after any type of failure occurs. The recovery mechanism must be designed so that the availability and performance of the system are not unacceptably impacted by the recovery algorithms running during normal execution. On the other hand, enough information must be stored so that the database can be restored or transactions backed out in a reasonable amount of time. Concepts, techniques, and problems associated with database recovery will be presented in this thesis. The recovery issues for both centralized and distributed systems will be discussed, along with the tradeoffs of different recovery tools. The database recovery schemes in IMS/VS, DB2 and SDD-1 will be described to show approaches in existing systems

Ur/Web: A Simple Model for Programming the Web

The World Wide Web has evolved gradually from a document delivery platform to an architecture for distributed programming. This largely unplanned evolution is apparent in the set of interconnected languages and protocols that any Web application must manage. This paper presents Ur/Web, a domain-specific, statically typed functional programming language with a much simpler model for programming modern Web applications. Ur/Web's model is unified, where programs in a single programming language are compiled to other "Web standards" languages as needed; modular, supporting novel kinds of encapsulation of Web-specific state; and exposes simple concurrency, where programmers can reason about distributed, multithreaded applications via a mix of transactions and cooperative preemption. We give a tutorial introduction to the main features of Ur/Web, formalize the basic programming model with operational semantics, and discuss the language implementation and the production Web applications that use it.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1217501

Fault tolerant software technology for distributed computing system

Issued as Monthly reports [nos. 1-23], Interim technical report, Technical guide books [nos. 1-2], and Final report, Project no. G-36-64

Performance models of concurrency control protocols for transaction processing systems

Transaction processing plays a key role in a lot of IT infrastructures. It is widely used in a variety of contexts, spanning from database management systems to concurrent programming tools. Transaction processing systems leverage on concurrency control protocols, which allow them to concurrently process transactions preserving essential properties, as isolation and atomicity. Performance is a critical aspect of transaction processing systems, and it is unavoidably affected by the concurrency control. For this reason, methods and techniques to assess and predict the performance of concurrency control protocols are of interest for many IT players, including application designers, developers and system administrators. The analysis and the proper understanding of the impact on the system performance of these protocols require quantitative approaches. Analytical modeling is a practical approach for building cost-effective computer system performance models, enabling us to quantitatively describe the complex dynamics characterizing these systems. In this dissertation we present analytical performance models of concurrency control protocols. We deal with both traditional transaction processing systems, such as database management systems, and emerging ones, as transactional memories. The analysis focuses on widely used protocols, providing detailed performance models and validation studies. In addition, we propose new modeling approaches, which also broaden the scope of our study towards a more realistic, application-oriented, performance analysis