Access invariance and its use in high contention environments

Abstract

Various factors suggest that data contention may be of increasing significance in transaction processing systems. One approach to this problem is to run transactions twice, the first time without making any changes to the database. Benefits may result either from data prefetching during the first execution or from determining the locks required for purposes of scheduling. Consideration is given to various concurrency control methods based on this notion, and properties required for these methods to be useful are formalized. Performance results based on detailed simulation models suggest that such policies offer potential benefits for some system configurations.