Definition
B-tree locking controls concurrent searches and updates in B-trees. It separates transactions in order to protect the B-tree contents and it separates threads in order to protect the B-tree data structure. Nowadays, the latter is usually called latching rather than locking.
Historical Background
Bayer and Schkolnick [1] presented multiple locking (latching) protocols for B*-trees (all data records in the leaves, merely separator keys or “reference keys” in upper nodes) that combined high concurrency with deadlock avoidance. Their approach for insertion and deletion is based on deciding during a root-to-leaf traversal whether a node is “safe” from splitting (during an insertion) or merging (during a deletion), and on reserving appropriate locks (latches) for ancestors of unsafe nodes.
Lehman and Yao defined Blink-trees by relaxing...
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Recommended Reading
Bayer R. and Schkolnick M. Concurrency of operations on B-trees. Acta Inf., 9:1–21, 1977.
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Graefe, G. (2009). B-Tree Locking. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_35
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