Transaction Chopping

Definition

Transaction chopping is a technique for improving the concurrent performance of a database system by reducing the time locks are held. The idea is to break up each transaction into smaller “pieces,” such that each piece executes as a transaction, but the effect is as if the original transactions executed serializably.

Key Points

Imagine an application that locks the entire database and then accesses a few rows in a table that does not fit into memory. If one looked at the resource statistics, one would find low CPU consumption and low disk utilization, yet the throughput would be very bad. For example, if ten pages were accessed even at 1 ms per page, then throughput would be only 100 transactions per second. The point is that it is possible to slow down performance greatly just because of a poor locking strategy, even if there are plenty of resources.

One might consider a less extreme case: a transaction that processes an order. The transaction might check whether there is...