Algorithm to process read-only transactions in real-time environments

Abstract

In this study, we investigate a different approach to maintaining serializability in real-time database systems (RTDBS) such that concurrency among transactions can be increased. The study is motivated by the dominance of read only transactions (ROTs) in many real-time applications. Given the knowledge about the read/write characteristics of transactions, it can be more efficient and effective to process ROTs separately from update transactions (UTs). In particular, we have devised an independent algorithm to process ROTs while a conventional concurrency control protocol such as optimistic concurrency control (OCC) can be employed to process UTs. Using a separate algorithm to process ROTs can reduce the interference between UTs and ROTs. The undesirable overhead caused by transaction restart and blocking due to concurrency control can be alleviated. Consequently, the timeliness of the system can be improved. The performance of using this approach is examined through a series of simulation experiments. The results showed that the performance of ROTs in terms of miss rate and restart rate is improved significantly while the performance of UTs is also improved slightly. As a result, separate processing of ROTs is a viable approach that achieves better performance and resource utilization than using solely the OCC protocol, one of the best performing protocols in the literature of real-time database.