Visualizing Concurrency Control Algorithms for Real-Time Database Systems

In addition to satisfying data consistency requirements as in conventional database systems, concurrency control in real-time database systems must also satisfy timing constraints, such as deadlines associated with transactions. Concurrency control for a real-time database system can be studied from several different perspectives. This largely depends on how the system is specified in terms of data consistency requirements and timing constraints. The objective of this research is to investigate and propose concurrency control algorithms for real-time database systems, that not only satisfy consistency requirements but also meet transaction timing constraints as much as possible, minimizing the percentage and average lateness of deadline-missing transactions. To fulfill the goals of this study, we conduct our research in three phases. First, we develop a model for a real-time database system and study the performance of various concurrency control protocol classes under a variety of operating conditions. Through this study, we understand the characteristics of each protocol and their impact on the performance, and ensure the validity of our real-time database system model by reconfirming the results from previous performance studies on concurrency control for real-time database systems. Second, we choose optimistic technique as the basic mechanism for our study on concurrency control for real-time database systems, and investigate its behavior in a firmdeadline environment where tardy transactions are discarded. We present a new optimistic concurrency control algorithm that outperforms previous ones over a wide range of operating conditions, and thus provides a promising candidate for the basic concurrency control mechanism for real-time database systems. Finally, we address the problem of incorporating deadline information into optimistic protocols to improve their real-time performance. We present a new priority-cognizant conflict resolution scheme that is shown to provide