Split-Transactions for Open-Ended Activities

Abstract

Open-ended activities such as CAD/Cam, VLSI layout and software development require consistent concurrent access and fault tolerance associated with database transactions, but their uncertain duration, uncertain developments during execution and long interaction with other concurrent activities break traditional transaction atomicity boundaries. We propose split-transaction as a new database operation that solves the above problems by permitting transactions to commit data that will not change. Thus an open-ended activity can release the committed data and serialize interactions with other concurrent activities through the committed data. This technical report was originally titled Support of Multiuser Software Development Environments.