Adaptive optimistic concurrency control for heterogeneous workloads

Abstract

Optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocols validate whether a transaction has conflicts with other concurrent transactions after this transaction completes its execution. In this work, we demonstrate that the validation phase has a great influence on the performance of modern in-memory database systems, especially under heterogeneous workloads. The cost of validating operations in a transaction is determined by two main factors. The first factor is the operation type. An OCC protocol would take much less cost on validating a single-record read operation than validating a key-range scan operation. The second factor is the workload type. Existing schemes in OCC variants for validating key-range scan perform differently under various workloads. Although various validation schemes share the same goal of guaranteeing a transaction schedule to be serializable, there are remarkable differences between the costs they introduced. These observations motivate us to design an optimistic concurrency control which can choose a low-cost validation scheme at runtime, referred to as adaptive optimistic concurrency control (AOCC). First, at transaction-level granularity, AOCC can assign a validation method to a transaction according to the features of its operations. Furthermore, for each operation in a transaction, the validation method is selected according to not only the number of accessed records but also the instant characteristics of workloads. Experimental results show that AOCC has good performance and scalability under heterogeneous workloads mixed with point accesses and predicate queries.