Using Semantic Knowledge for Transaction Processing (Thesis)

Abstract:

New methods of concurrency control that utilize the semantics of an application to improve performance have been proposed in recent years. In this thesis we study one of these mechanisms. After presenting the details of the mechanism, we compare it, via a simulation, to a conventional two phase locking strategy.
The goal of such comparison is to determine the conditions under which the higher complexity and overhead of the application dependent mechanism pays off. Although the results presented are specific to the two selected mechanisms, we believe they provide insight into the operation of other application dependent mechanisms. Also, we present an application of our mechanism that will help to manage long lived transactions (LLT). This application shows that for the cases when a large percentage of the transactions in the system are compatible with the executing LLTs, the performance of the system improves greatly.