Optimistic Concurrency Control Protocol Research Articles

Polaris: Enabling Transaction Priority in Optimistic Concurrency Control

Transaction priority is a critical feature for real-world database systems. Under high contention, certain classes of transactions should be given a higher chance to commit than others. Such a prioritization mechanism is commonly implemented in locking-based concurrency control protocols as some lock scheduling mechanisms, but it is rarely supported in the world of optimistic concurrency control. We present Polaris, an optimistic concurrency control protocol that supports multiple priority levels. To enforce priority, Polaris introduces a minimal amount of pessimism through a lightweight reservation mechanism. The protocol is fully optimistic among transactions within the same priority level and preserves the high throughput advantage of optimistic protocols. Our evaluation with YCSB workload shows that Polaris can make the p999 tail latency of high-priority transactions 13x lower than that of low-priority ones. With an abort-aware priority assignment policy, Polaris can deliver 1.9x higher throughput and 17x lower tail latency compared to Silo for high-contention workloads.

G-tran

Graph transaction processing poses unique challenges such as random data access due to the irregularity of graph structures, low throughput and high abort rate due to the relatively large read/write sets in graph transactions. To address these challenges, we present G-Tran, a remote direct memory access (RDMA)-enabled distributed in-memory graph database with serializable and snapshot isolation support. First, we propose a graph-native data store to achieve good data locality and fast data access for transactional updates and queries. Second, G-Tran adopts a fully decentralized architecture that leverages RDMA to process distributed transactions with the massively parallel processing (MPP) model, which can achieve high performance by utilizing all computing resources. In addition, we propose a new multi-version optimistic concurrency control (MV-OCC) protocol with two optimizations to address the issue of large read/write sets in graph transactions. Extensive experiments show that G-Tran achieves competitive performance compared with other popular graph databases on benchmark workloads.

In-page shadowing and two-version timestamp ordering for mobile DBMSs

Increasing the concurrency level in mobile database systems has not received much attention, mainly because the concurrency requirements of mobile workloads has been regarded to be low. Contrary to popular belief, mobile workloads require higher concurrency. In this work, we propose novel journaling and concurrency mechanisms for mobile DBMSs, both of which build upon one common concept - In-Page Shadowing (IPS). We design and implement a novel In-Page Shadowing recovery method for SQLite to resolve the journaling of journal anomaly, which is known to quadruple the I/O traffic in mobile devices. IPS unions the previous and the next versions of a database page in the same physical page. Using the consolidated two versions of database page, we design Two-Version Timestamp-Ordering (2VTO) protocol that enables non-blocking reads as in multi-version concurrency control, but reduces the garbage collection overhead. Designed with mobile environments in mind, IPS and 2VTO are high-performant and resource-efficient transactional solutions. Our performance study shows that IPS and 2VTO outperform state-of-the-art logging methods and an optimistic concurrency control protocol for real mobile workloads.

An analysis of concurrency control protocols for in-memory databases with CCBench

This paper presents yet another concurrency control analysis platform, CCBench. CCBench supports seven protocols (Silo, TicToc, MOCC, Cicada, SI, SI with latch-free SSN, 2PL) and seven versatile optimization methods and enables the configuration of seven workload parameters. We analyzed the protocols and optimization methods using various workload parameters and a thread count of 224. Previous studies focused on thread scalability and did not explore the space analyzed here. We classified the optimization methods on the basis of three performance factors: CPU cache, delay on conflict, and version lifetime. Analyses using CCBench and 224 threads, produced six insights. The performance of optimistic concurrency control protocol for a read-only workload rapidly degrades as cardinality increases even without L3 cache misses. (I2) Silo can outperform TicToc for some write-intensive workloads by using invisible reads optimization. (I3) The effectiveness of two approaches to coping with conflict (wait and no-wait) depends on the situation. (I4) OCC reads the same record two or more times if a concurrent transaction interruption occurs, which can improve performance. (I5) Mixing different implementations is inappropriate for deep analysis. (I6) Even a state-of-the-art garbage collection method cannot improve the performance of multi-version protocols if there is a single long transaction mixed into the workload. On the basis of I4, we defined the read phase extension optimization in which an artificial delay is added to the read phase. On the basis of I6, we defined the aggressive garbage collection optimization in which even visible versions are collected. The code for CCBench and all the data in this paper are available online at GitHub.

IoT transaction processing through cooperative concurrency control on fog–cloud computing environment

In cloud–fog environments, the opportunity to avoid using the upstream communication channel from the clients to the cloud server all the time is possible by fluctuating the conventional concurrency control protocols. Through the present paper, the researcher aimed to introduce a new variant of the optimistic concurrency control protocol. Through the deployment of augmented partial validation protocol, IoT transactions that are read-only can be processed at the fog node locally. For final validation, update transactions are the only ones sent to the cloud. Moreover, the update transactions go through partial validation at the fog node which makes them more opportunist to commit at the cloud. This protocol reduces communication and computation at the cloud as much as possible while supporting scalability of the transactional services needed by the applications running in such environments. Based on numerical studies, the researcher assessed the partial validation procedure under three concurrency protocols. The study’s results indicate that employing the proposed mechanism shall generate benefits for IoT users. These benefits are obtained from transactional services. We evaluated the effect of deployment the partial validation at the fog node for the three concurrency protocols, namely AOCCRBSC, AOCCRB and STUBcast. We performed a set of intensive experiments to compare the three protocols with and without such deployment. The result reported a reduction in miss rate, restart rate and communication delay in all of them. The researcher found that the proposed mechanism reduces the communication delay significantly. They found that the proposed mechanism shall enable low-latency fog computing services of the IoT applications that are a delay sensitive.

Adaptive optimistic concurrency control for heterogeneous workloads

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.

Sundial

Distributed transactions suffer from poor performance due to two major limiting factors. First, distributed transactions suffer from high latency because each of their accesses to remote data incurs a long network delay. Second, this high latency increases the likelihood of contention among distributed transactions, leading to high abort rates and low performance. We present Sundial , an in-memory distributed optimistic concurrency control protocol that addresses these two limitations. First, to reduce the transaction abort rate, Sundial dynamically determines the logical order among transactions at runtime, based on their data access patterns. Sundial achieves this by applying logical leases to each data element, which allows the database to dynamically calculate a transaction's logical commit timestamp. Second, to reduce the overhead of remote data accesses, Sundial allows the database to cache remote data in a server's local main memory and maintains cache coherence. With logical leases, Sundial integrates concurrency control and cache coherence into a simple unified protocol. We evaluate Sundial against state-of-the-art distributed concurrency control protocols. Sundial outperforms the next-best protocol by up to 57% under high contention. Sundial's caching scheme improves performance by up to 4.6× in workloads with high access skew.

An New Research for Optimistic Concurrency Control Protocol in Mobile Computing Environment

An New Research for Optimistic Concurrency Control Protocol in Mobile Computing Environment

Embedded Real-Time Database System Concurrency Control Protocol AC-Based OCC-FV

Alternative and compensation are not only two basic characteristics of the real-time transaction but also the body of the concurrency control. At the same time, new problems are brought. AC-Based OCC-FV protocol associates alternative and compensation with optimistic concurrency control protocol OCC-FV. For each transaction in accepted queue, an alternative which causes no conflict can be chosen to join the ready queue as soon as possible. This is just a kind of ideal circumstance. If the conflict is inevitable, it is necessary to choose a suitable alternative to join the concurrency control, but also ensures the system to be in a safe state when conflicts take place. In conflict resolution, the optimistic concurrency control protocol OCC-FV is extended in combination with the compensation characteristic, when the transaction failed, immediate dispatch of corresponding compensation transactions is taken to prevent the system from disaster.

A Multiversion Optimistic Concurrency Control Protocol in Mobile Broadcast Environments

This paper presents MVOCC-MDA-2PV (multiversion optimistic concurrency control with multiversion dynamic adjustment using two-phase validation) protocol for processing mobile real-time transaction in mobile broadcast environments. Transaction validation is performed at two phases: pre-validation and final validation. At the mobile herts (MHs), all mobile transactions (MT) perform pre-validation of transactions by using backward validation mechanism. The pre-validation process is carried out against committed transactions at the server in the last broadcast cycle. Such an early data conflict detection feature can save processing and communication resources. Transactions that survive in pre-validation must be submitted to the server for final validation. The MHs do not need to synchronize with each other and servers for data conflict detection. The protocol can eliminate conflicts between mobile read-only and mobile update transactions, and resolve data conflicts flexibly using multiversion dynamic adjustment of serialization order to avoid unnecessary restarts of transactions. For a mobile ready-only transaction, it can be committed locally in the MH if it passes all the pre-validation in the course of it execution. Respond time of mobile read-only transactions (MROT) is greatly improved. The results of experiment show that the new protocol proposed offers better performance in terms of miss rate and commit rate.

Modeling selected real-time database concurrency control protocols in Uppaal

Real-time database management systems (RTDBMS) are recently subject of an intensive research. Model checking algorithms and verification tools are of great concern as well. In this paper, we show some possibilities of using a verification tool Uppaal on some variants of pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control protocols used in real-time database management systems. We present some possible models of such protocols expressed as nets of timed automata, which are a modeling language of Uppaal.

An efficient secure real-time concurrency control protocol

Secure real-time databases must simultaneously satisfy two requirements in guaranteeing data security and minimizing the missing deadlines ratio of transactions. However, these two requirements can conflict with each other and achieve one requirement is to sacrifice the other. This paper presents a secure real-time concurrency control protocol based on optimistic method. The concurrency control protocol incorporates security constraints in a real-time optimistic concurrency control protocol and makes a suitable tradeoff between security and real-time requirements by introducing secure influence factor and real-time influence factor. The experimental results show the concurrency control protocol achieves data security without degrading real-time performance significantly.

Efficient validation of mobile transactions in wireless environments

In broadcast environments, the limited bandwidth of the upstream communication channel from the mobile clients to the server bars the application of conventional concurrency control protocols. In this paper, we propose a new variant of the optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocol that is suitable for broadcast environments. At the server, forward validation of a transaction is done against currently running transactions, including mobile transactions and server transactions. At the mobile clients, partial backward validation of a transaction is done against committed transactions at the beginning of every broadcast cycle. Upon completion of execution, read-only mobile transactions can be validated and committed locally and update mobile transactions are sent to the server for final validation. These update transactions have a better chance of commitment because they have gone through the partial backward validation. In addition to the nice properties of conventional OCC protocols, this protocol provides autonomy between the mobile clients and the server with minimum upstream communication, which is a desirable feature to the scalability of applications running in broadcast environments. This protocol is able to process both update transactions and read-only transactions at the mobile clients at low space and processing overheads.

이동 트랜잭션을 위한 새로운 낙관적 동시성 제어 방법

많은 수의 클라이언트들에게 데이터를 방송하는 환경에서 가장 큰 제약은 서버와 통신하는데 이용가능한 대역폭이 낮다는 점이다. 이동 컴퓨팅 환경에서 많은 응용들이 개발되고 있으나, 무선망의 낮은 대역폭으로 인하여 전통적인 동시성 제어 방법을 그대로 적용하기 어렵다. 이 논문에서는 이동 트랜잭션을 위한 새로운 낙관적 동시성 제어 방법을 제안한다. 제안하는 방법에서 판독 전용 트랜잭션은 서버와 부가적인 메시지 교환없이 지역적으로 완료가 가능하며, 이동 갱신 트랜잭션은 서버로 보내져 전역적 검증을 수행한다. 또한 충돌 정보를 이용한 낙관적 방법에서 발생하는 트랜잭션의 불필요한 철회를 줄이고, 데이터 테이블에 유지된 정보를 이용하여 직렬가능하지 않은 수행을 찾아 직렬성 위배를 해결할 수 있다. A crucial limitation in environments where data is broadcast to very large client populations is the low bandwidth available for clients to communicate with servers. Many advanced applications are developed in mobile computing environments, but conventional concurrency controls are not suitable because of the low bandwidth of wireless network. In this paper, we propose a new optimistic concurrency control protocol for mobile transactions. In this protocol, mobile read-only transactions can be completed locally at the clients without additional communication, only mobile update transactions are sent to the server for global validation. Our protocol reduces unnecessary aborts occurred in the previous study using only conflict information. In addition to, our algorithm can detect and resolve non-serializable execution using by data table maintained in a server.

Concurrency control for mixed transactions in real-time databases

Many recent studies have suggested that the optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocols outperform the locking-based protocols in real-time database systems (RTDBS). However, the OCC protocols suffer from the problem of unnecessary transaction restarts that is detrimental to transactions meeting their deadlines. The problem is more intensified in mixed transaction environments. Firm transactions are more vulnerable to restarts when they are in conflict with hard transactions on data access. In this paper, we addressed the problem and devised an effective OCC protocol with dynamic adjustment of serialization order, called OCC-DA, for RTDBS with mixed transactions. This protocol can avoid unnecessary transaction restarts by dynamically adjusting the serialization order of the conflicting transactions with respect to the validating transaction. As a result, much resource can be saved and more firm transactions can meet their deadlines without affecting the execution of hard transactions. The characteristics of the OCC-DA protocol were examined in detail by simulation. The results show that the performance of the OCC-DA protocol was consistently better than the other two popular protocols, OCC with forward validation and OCC with Wait-50, over a wide range of system settings. In particular, the OCC-DA protocol provides a more significant performance gain in mixed transaction environments.

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

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.

Conflict free transaction scheduling using serialization graph for real-time databases

A best effort approach to data scheduling, such as optimistic concurrency control in real-time database systems (RTDBS), imposes a heavy burden on the systems by restarting conflicting transactions. The restarted transactions themselves may miss their deadlines and the resources consumed by them may be wasted. Hence it can be better to schedule transactions such that only conflict free transactions can be executed concurrently at one time. This study explores this approach by making use of serialization graph testing. A serialization graph is used to enforce the serializability of transactions. Only transactions without data conflicts with the executing transactions will be allocated CPU. Consequently, conflict free concurrency among executing transactions can be achieved. All resources including CPU, I/O and data objects will not be wasted on restarted transactions. Therefore, the system can sustain a higher workload. We also devise a real-time serialization graph that considers the timing constraints of transactions. By using our protocols, only a limited amount of transaction delay overhead is observed. However, experimental results confirm that the overall performance of our protocols is better than the real-time optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocol that is reported as one of the best performing data scheduling approaches in RTDBS.

Is a bird in the hand worth more than two in the bush? Limitations of priority cognizance in conflict resolution for firm real-time database systems

After a "boom" period from the late 80s to the early 90s, there appears to have been a reduction in the amount of work published on Concurrency Control (CC) in real-time database systems (RTDBS) in general and firm RTDBS in particular. This may be because existing paradigms (e.g., Optimistic CC) have been pushed to their limits and it is difficult to extract additional meaningful performance. One of the last unresolved bastions of real-time CC is the successful incorporation of priority cognizance. Researchers have speculated that priority cognizant optimistic concurrency control (OCC) algorithms, if designed well, could outperform priority insensitive ones in real-time database systems. So far, however, there is a distinct lack of conclusive proof available on this topic and the priority cognizant OCC algorithms that have appeared so far in the literature cannot claim unilateral superiority over their priority insensitive relatives. We thus surmise that successful incorporation of priority cognizance may lead to an increase in the performance of OCC protocols in firm RTDBSs. Based on this premise, we analyze the issue of priority cognizance and identify a critical condition that must hold for priority cognizant conflict resolution to work. The condition is that, on the average, the conflict sets of validating transactions should have a "large" number of transactions: We call this a bird in hand more than two in the bush phenomenon. Subsequently, we design a smart priority cognizant OCC variant, which we call OCC-APR, and analyze its performance, as well as that of several other concurrency control algorithms across a wide range of resource contention and system loading parameters. Surprisingly, it turns out that it is very difficult for priority cognizance to work as the above mentioned condition does not, usually,hold. We explain why this occurs and conclude that priority cognizance does not appear to be a promising technique to increase real-time CC performance. The contribution of this paper, thus, is to have laid to rest the "priority cognizance" issue with regard to real-time CCMs.

Secure Concurrency Control in Firm Real-Time Database Systems

Many real-time database applications arise in electronic financial services, safety-critical installations and military systems where enforcing security is crucial to the success of the enterprise. For real-time database systems supporting applications with firm deadlines, we investigate here the performance implications, in terms of killed transactions, of guaranteeing multilevel secrecy. In particular, we focus on the concurrency control (CC) aspects of this issue. Our main contributions are the following: First, we identify which among the previously proposed real-time CC protocols are capable of providing covert-channel-free security. Second, using a detailed simulation model, we profile the real-time performance of a representative set of these secure CC protocols for a variety of security-classified workloads and system configurations. Our experiments show that a prioritized optimistic CC protocol, OPT-WAIT, provides the best overall performance. Third, we propose and evaluate a novel “dual-CC” approach that allows the real-time database system to simultaneously use different CC mechanisms for guaranteeing security and for improving real-time performance. By appropriately choosing these different mechanisms, concurrency control protocols that provide even better performance than OPT-WAIT are designed. Finally, we propose and evaluate GUARD, an adaptive admission-control policy designed to provide fairness with respect to the distribution of killed transactions across security levels. Our experiments show that GUARD efficiently provides close to ideal fairness for real-time applications that can tolerate covert channel bandwidths of upto one bit per second.

Transaction Scheduling in Distributed Real-Time Systems

In this paper, we study the performance of using optimistic approach to concurrency control in distributed real-time database systems (RTDBS). The traditional optimistic approach suffers from the problem of unnecessary restarts. Transaction restarts can significantly increase the system workload and intensify resource and data contention. In distributed environments, the complexity of the system and the high communication overhead exacerbate the problem. Therefore, the number of unnecessary restarts is the determinant factor that affects the performance of optimistic approach in distributed RTDBS. When optimistic approach is extended to distributed environments, a number of issues resulting from the increased complexity and communication overhead have to be resolved. In this paper, a new real-time distributed optimistic concurrency control (DOCC) protocol with dynamic adjustment of serialization order (DASO), called DOCC-DA is proposed. This protocol can avoid unnecessary transaction restarts by dynamically adjusting the serialization order of the conflicting transactions. Therefore, resources can be saved and more transactions can meet their deadlines. In the DOCC-DA protocol, a new distributed circular validation scheme is included to facilitate transaction validation in distributed environments. The performance of the DOCC-DA protocol has been examined in detail by simulation. The results showed that the performance of the DOCC-DA protocol is consistently better than that of other protocols.