Formal Aspects of Serializability in Database Concurrency Control

Abstract

An arbitrary interleaved execution of transactions in a database system can lead to an inconsistent database state. A number of synchronization mechanisms have been proposed to prevent such spurious behavior. To gain insight into these mechanisms, we analyze them in a simple centralized system that permits one read operation and one write operation per transaction. We show why locking mechanisms lead to correct operation, we show that two proposed mechanisms for distributed environments are special cases of locking, and we present a new version of lockdng that alows more concurrency than past methods. We also examine conflict graph analysis, the method used in the SDD-1 distributed database system, we prove its correctness, and we show that it can be used to substantially improve the performance of almost any synchronization mechanisn.