Partitioned two-phase locking

Abstract

In a large integrated database, there often exists an “information hierarchy,” where both raw data and derived data are stored and used together. Therefore, among update transactions, there will often be some that perform only read accesses from a certain (i.e., the “raw” data) portion of the database and write into another (i.e., the “derived” data) portion. A conventional concurrency control algorithm would have treated such transactions as regular update transactions and subjected them to the usual protocols for synchronizing update transactions. In this paper such transactions are examined more closely. The purpose is to devise concurrency control methods that allow the computation of derived information to proceed without interfering with the updating of raw data. The first part of the paper presents a proof method for correctness of concurrency control algorithms in a hierarchically decomposed database. The proof method provides a framework for understanding the intricacies in dealing with hierarchically decomposed databases. The second part of the paper is an application of the proof method to show the correctness of a two-phase-locking- based algorithm, called partitioned two-phase locking, for hierarchically decomposed databases. This algorithm is a natural extension to the Version Pool method proposed previously in the literature.