Exploiting a database system in scheduling internet-based workflows

  • Authors:

  • Juha Puustjärvi

  • Affiliations:

  • Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Workflow is a collection of tasks that belong together in order to achieve a certain business goal. The workflows in which tasks are comprised of the execution of Web services are called Internet-based workflows. Analogous with transactions the correct execution of workflows requires workflows instances to be executed in an atomic and isolated way. Although the issue of the atomicity of Internet-based workflows is well understood and widely studied, the role of concurrency control is not neither well understood nor well studied in this context. In this paper, we restrict ourselves on this problem. The corner stone in our approach is the Workflow database, which stores information about the states of active workflow instances. The key idea is to control the interleaving of workflow instances by controlling the updates of the Workflow database by SQL-constraints. A gain of this approach is that the workflow isolation requirements nicely match the expression power of SQL-constraints, which in turn makes it possible to achieve a high degree of concurrency. In addition, workflow concurrency control can be easily implemented by utilizing the services of the underlying relational database management system.