Transaction chopping: algorithms and performance studies

• Authors: Dennis Shasha;Francois Llirbat;Eric Simon;Patrick Valduriez
• Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
• Year: 1995

Chopping transactions into pieces is good for performance but may lead to nonserializable executions. Many researchers have reacted to this fact by either inventing new concurrency-control mechanisms, weakening serializability, or both. We adopt a different approach. We assume a user who—has access only to user-level tools such as (1) choosing isolation degrees 1ndash;4, (2) the ability to execute a portion of a transaction using multiversion read consistency, and (3) the ability to reorder the instructions in transaction programs; and —knows the set of transactions that may run during a certain interval (users are likely to have such knowledge for on-line or real-time transactional applications).Given this information, our algorithm finds the finest chopping of a set of transactions TranSet with the following property: If the pieces of the chopping execute serializably, then TranSet executes serializably. This permits users to obtain more concurrency while preserving correctness. Besides obtaining more intertransaction concurrency, chopping transactions in this way can enhance intratransaction parallelism.The algorithm is inexpensive, running in O(n×(e+m)) time, once conflicts are identified, using a naive implementation, where n is the number of concurrent transactions in the interval, e is the number of edges in the conflict graph among the transactions, and m is the maximum number of accesses of any transaction. This makes it feasible to add as a tuning knob to real systems.