Database Concurrency Control: Methods, Performance, and Analysis

This work is a review of developments in concurrency control methods for centralized database systems, with a quick digression into distributed databases and multicomputers, the emphasis being on performance. Its main goals are: to specify various concurrency control methods; to describe models for evaluating the relative performance of concurrency control methods; to point out problem areas in earlier performance analyses; to introduce queuing network models to evaluate the baseline performance of transaction processing systems; to provide insights into the relative performance of transaction processing systems; to illustrate the application of basic analytic methods to the performance analysis of various concurrency control methods; to review transaction models which are intended to relieve the effect of lock contention; to provide guidelines for improving the performance of transaction processing systems due to concurrency control; and to point out areas for further investigation.

This monograph should be of interest to computer scientists doing research on concurrency control methods for high performance transaction processing systems, designers of such systems, and professionals concerned with improving (tuning) the performance of transaction processing systems.