Other Real-Time Concurrency Control Schemes
One way to improve the responsiveness of soft real-time jobs that read and write multiple data objects is to abort and restart the lower-priority job whenever it conflicts (i.e., contends for some data object) with a higher-priority job. A policy that governs which job proceeds at the expense of which job is called a conflict resolution policy.
Well-Known Conflict Resolution Policies. To explain conflict resolution policies that have been proposed for database transactions, we note that each transaction typically keeps a copy of each object it reads and may write in its own memory space. When it completes all the reads, writes, and computations, it writes all data objects it has modified back to the global space. This last step is called commit. So, until a transaction commits, no shared data object in the database is modified, and it is safe to abort and restart a transaction and take back the data objects allocated to it.
Abbott, et al. [AbMo] showed that the 2PL-HP schemes perform well for soft real-time transactions compared with Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) schemes, which we will explain shortly. According to the 2PL-HP scheme, all transactions follow a two-phase policy in their acquisitions of (locks of) data objects. Whenever two transactions conflict (i.e., they want to access the same object), the lower-priority transaction is restarted immediately (i.e., the executing instance is aborted and new instance is made ready immediately). In essence, this scheme allocates data objects to transactions preemptively. Therefore, priority inversion cannot occur.
The results of a soft real-time transaction remains useful to some extent even when the transaction completes late. In contrast, the result of a late transaction with a firm deadline is useless and hence is discarded. The 2PL-HP scheme does not work well for firm real-time transactions compared with OCC schemes. The reason is that 2PL-HP can cause wasted restart and wasted wait [HoJC]. The former refers to a restart of a lower-priority transaction which turns out to be unnecessary because the conflicting higher-priority transaction completes late.
A way to reduce wasted restarts is by simply suspending a conflicting lower-priority transaction when a conflict occurs. If the conflicting higher-priority transaction completes in time, the suspended transaction is aborted and restarted. On the other hand, if the conflicting transaction completes late, the suspended transaction can resume. Unfortunately, the stop and wait may cause the lower-priority transaction to be late, and thus incurs wasted wait.
Optimistic Concurrency Control Schemes. Optimistic concurrency control is an alternative approach to two-phase locking. Under the control of an OCC scheme, whether a transaction conflict with other executing transactions is checked immediately before the transaction commits. This step is called validation. If the transaction is found to conflict with other transactions at the time, one of them is allowed to proceed and commit, while the conflicting transactions are restarted. Different OCC schemes differ in the choices of these transactions. A priority-based OCC scheme allows a conflicting lower-priority scheme to proceed until validation time and then is restarted if it is found to conflict with some higher-priority transaction at validation time.
Most performance evaluation studies (e.g., [HaCL, LeSo] found that OCC schemes perform better than 2PL-based schemes in terms of on-time completions of real-time transactions. However, when the performance criterion is temporal consistency, OCC schemes tend to give poorer performance, especially when the transactions are periodic. In particular, Song, et al. [SoLi] found that the age and dispersion of data read by transactions tend to be larger under an OCC scheme than under lock-based schemes. (The terms temporal consistency, age and dispersion were defined in Section 1.4.1.) This is because both blocking and preemption can cause temporal inconsistency (i.e., age and dispersion of data being large). Blocking due to resource contention can cause higher-priority update transactions to complete late and data to be old. However, preempted transactions may read data that are old and have large age dispersion as well. When transactions are periodic, a transaction restarted in one period is likely to restart again in other periods. The repeated restarts lead to a large variance in the age and dispersion of data.
