Evaluation of concurrency control strategies for mixed soft real-time database systems

Abstract

Previous research in real-time concurrency control mainly focuses on the schedulability guarantee of hard real-time transactions and the reduction of the miss rate of soft real-time transactions. Although many new database applications have significant response time requirements, not much work has been done in the joint scheduling of traditional non-real-time transactions and soft real-time transactions. In this paper, we study the concurrency control problems in mixed soft real-time database systems, in which both non-real-time and soft real-time transactions exist simultaneously. The objectives are to identify the cost and the performance tradeoff in the design of cost-effective and practical real-time concurrency control protocols, and to evaluate their performance under different real-time and non-real-time supports. In particular, we are interested in studying the impacts of different scheduling approaches for soft real-time transactions on the performance of non-real-time transactions. Instead of proposing yet another completely new real-time concurrency control protocol, our objective is to design an efficient integrated concurrency control method based on existing techniques. We propose several methods to integrate the well-known two phase locking and optimistic concurrency control with the aims to meet the deadline requirements of soft real-time transactions and, at the same time, to minimize the impact on the performance of non-real-time transactions. We have conducted a series of experiments based on a sanitized version of stock trading systems to evaluate the performance of both soft real-time and non-real-time transactions under different real-time supports in the system.