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B-Tree Locking

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

B-tree concurrency control; Crabbing; Key range locking; Key value locking; Latch coupling; Latching; Lock coupling; Row-level locking

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

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Goetz Graefe

Authors
  1. Goetz Graefe
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Goetz Graefe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dep. of Inf. Systems, Westf. Wilhelms-Univeristät, Münster, Germany

    Gottfried Vossen

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Graefe, G. (2018). B-Tree Locking. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_35

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