Distributed Version Management for Read-Only Actions

  • Authors:
  • William E. Weihl

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on distributed systems
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

Typical concurrency control protocols for atomic actions, such as two-phase locking, perform poorly for long read-only actions. We present four new concurrency control protocols that eliminate all interference between read-only actions and update actions, and thus offer significantly improved performance for read-only actions. The protocols work by maintaining multiple versions of the system state; read-only actions read old versions, while update actions manipulate the most recent version. We focus on the problem of managing the storage required for old versions in a distributed system. One of the protocols uses relatively little space, but has a potentially significant communication cost. The other protocols use more space, but may be cheaper in terms of communication.