Contest of XML lock protocols

Abstract

We explore and compare the performance behavior of lock protocols to be used in XML DBMSs (XDBMSs, for short) supporting typical XML document processing interfaces. In this paper, we outline 11 protocols proposed in the literature, highlight essential implementation concepts of our XDBMS and realize all of them in the same DBMS environment using so-called meta-synchronization. We design a framework for XML benchmarks including read and update transactions, run extensive empirical experiments which focus on the locking performance, and compare the results using various performance metrics. As a consequence, we can propose a group of protocols which won this practical contest under identical conditions.