Investigations in tree locking for compiled database applications
Heng Yu, Grant Weddell · 2004
We report on initial research in tree locking (TL) schemes for compiled database applications. Such applications have a repository style of architecture in which a collection of software modules operate on a common database in terms of a set of predefined transaction types, an architectural view that is also useful for embedded control programs. Since TL schemes are deadlock free, it becomes possible to entirely decouple concurrency control from any functionality relating to recovery. This property can help in the deployment of database technology to this new application area. Moreover, with knowledge of transaction workload, efficacious lock trees for runtime concurrency control can be determined at the time of system generation. Our experimental results show that TL produces better throughput than traditional two-phase locking (2PL) when transactions are write-only; and for main-memory data, TL performs comparably to 2PL even in workloads with many reads.