Abstract
Concurrency control in a distributed database refers to mechanisms which
permit multiple transactions to operate on the database simultaneously
while ensuring that the database appears consistent to each transaction.
Problems which need to be addressed include avoiding or recovering from
deadlocked transactions and making transactions operate on a consistent
database atomically. Considerable research has been done in this area
and concurrency control mechanisms based on two-phase locking and
two-phase commit [Hammer80], timestamps [Rosenkrantz78] [Thomas79],
multiversion data objects [Reed78] and conflict analysis [Bernstein80a]
[Bernstein80b] have been proposed. Each approach offers different
advantages and incurs different costs.
In this paper we investigate an optimistic algorithm for synchronising
distributed database transactions that is based on Time Warp (TW) described
by Jefferson [Jefferson85]. The database is assumed to consist of a set
of long lived abstract data objects that are operated upon concurrently
by a changing set of short lived objects, i.e. transactions. First,
a brief outline of the TW algorithm is given, then the characteristics of
a concurrency control (CC) algorithm based on TW is presented and finally,
we discuss problems and advantages of this CC algorithm, and experience
with a particular implementation.
