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Operational specification with joint actions: Serializable databases

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Summary

Joint actions are introduced as a language basis for operational specification of reactive systems. Joint action systems are closed systems with no communication primitives. Their nondeterministic execution model is based on multi-party actions without an explicit control flow, and they are amenable for stepwise derivation by superposition. The approach is demonstrated by deriving a specification for serializable databases in simple derivation steps. Two different implementation strategies are imposed on this as further derivations. One of the strategies is two-phase locking, for which a separate implementation is given and proved correct. The other is multiversion timestamp ordering, for which the derivation itself is an implementation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Systems Laboratory, Tampere University of Technology, Box 553, SF-33101, Tampere, Finland

    Reino Kurki-Suonio

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  1. Reino Kurki-Suonio
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Reino Kurki-Suonio received a Dr. Phil. degree from the University of Helsinki in 1964. At the University of Tampere he headed the first computer science department in Scandinavia since its creation in 1965. Currently he is professor of computer science and engineering at Tampere University of Technology. He has held visiting positions at Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford Universities. During the years his research interests have shifted from formal grammars, parsing methods, and programming languages to formal specification and design of distributed systems.

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Kurki-Suonio, R. Operational specification with joint actions: Serializable databases. Distrib Comput 6, 19–37 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02276639

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