Multiversion concurrency control—theory and algorithms

Abstract

Concurrency control is the activity of synchronizing operations issued by concurrently executing programs on a shared database. The goal is to produce an execution that has the same effect as a serial (noninterleaved) one. In a multiversion database system, each write on a data item produces a new copy (or version ) of that data item. This paper presents a theory for analyzing the correctness of concurrency control algorithms for multiversion database systems. We use the theory to analyze some new algorithms and some previously published ones.