Pii: S0950-5849(99)00062-2

Two-phase locking (2PL) is the concurrency control mechanism that is used in most commercial database systems. In 2PL, for a transaction to access a data item, it has to hold the appropriate lock (read or write) on the data item by issuing a lock request. While the way transactions set their lock requests and the way the requests are granted would certainly affect a system’s performance, such aspects have not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, a general transaction-processing model is proposed. In this model, a transaction is comprised of a number of stages, and in each stage the transaction can request to lock one or more data items. Methods for granting transaction requests and scheduling policies for granting blocked transactions are also proposed. A comprehensive simulation model is developed from which the performance of 2PL with our proposals is evaluated. Results indicate that performance models in which transactions request locks on an item-by-item basis and use first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling in granting blocked transactions underestimate the performance of 2PL. The performance of 2PL can be greatly improved if locks are requested in stages as dictated by the application. A scheduling policy that uses global information and/or schedules blocked transactions dynamically shows a better performance than the default FCFS. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.