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An optimality theory of concurrency control for databases

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Summary

A concurrency control mechanism (or a scheduler) is the component of a database system that safeguards the consistency of the database in the presence of interleaved accesses and update requests. We formally show that the performance of a scheduler, i.e., the amount of parallelism that it supports, depends explicitly upon the amount of information that is available to the scheduler. We point out that most previous work on concurrency control is simply concerned with specific points of this basic trade-off between performance and information. In fact, several of these approaches are shown to be optimal for the amount of information that they use.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    H. T. Kung

  2. Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    C. H. Papadimitriou

Authors
  1. H. T. Kung
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  2. C. H. Papadimitriou
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Additional information

This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants MCS 75-222-55. MCS 77-01193. MCS 77-05314. the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-76-C-0370. and a Miller Fellowship

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Kung, H.T., Papadimitriou, C.H. An optimality theory of concurrency control for databases. Acta Informatica 19, 1–11 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263925

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263925

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