Combining optimism and pessimism to produce high availability in distributed transaction processing

In a distributed system some or all of the data items are replicated and stored at separate nodes. This increases the availability of these items and it is then possible to complete transactions faster than in single node systems. Hovever the concurrent processing of transactions at separate nodes c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Operating systems review 1994-07, Vol.28 (3), p.43-64
Main Author: CRICHLOW, J. M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Computer science
control theory
systems
Exact sciences and technology
Information systems. Data bases
Memory organisation. Data processing
Software
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Summary:In a distributed system some or all of the data items are replicated and stored at separate nodes. This increases the availability of these items and it is then possible to complete transactions faster than in single node systems. Hovever the concurrent processing of transactions at separate nodes can generate inconsistencies in the stored information. Some mechanism must be employed to address the inconsistencies that can arise. A system has been designed that allows a transaction to be processed immediately (optimistically) at any individual node in a replicated system as long as the transaction satisfies a cost bound criterion. Such a transaction can make external responses but it does not alter the database. All transactions are also run in a global one-copy serializable manner (pessimistically) at which time their updates are committed. It may be necessary to make another external response. The transaction processing system is expressed as a simple computational model and the correctness of the system is discussed.
ISSN:0163-5980
1943-586X
DOI:10.1145/182110.182115