A straightforward analytic solution method is developed which takes into account the variability of transaction size (the number of lock requests). The authors first obtain analytic expressions for the probability of lock conflict, probability of deadlock, and the waiting time per lock conflict. They then develop a family of noniterative analytic solutions to evaluate the overall system performance by considering the expansion in transaction response time due to transaction blocking. The accuracy of these solutions is verified by validation against simulation results. Also introduced is a new measure for the degree of lock contention, which is a product of the mean number of lock conflicts per transaction and the mean waiting time per lock conflict (when blocked by an active transaction). It is shown that the variability in transaction size results in an increase in both measures as compared to fixed-size transactions of comparable size. The authors also provide a solution method for the case when the processing times of transaction steps are different.>

A detailed model of a transaction processing system with dynamic locking is developed and analyzed. Transaction classes are distinguished on the basis of the number of data items accessed and the access mode (read-only/update). The performance of the system is affected by transaction blocking and restarts, due to lock conflicts that do not or do cause deadlocks, respectively. The probability of these events is determined by the characteristics of transactions and the database access pattern. Hardware resource contention due to concurrent transaction processing is taken into account by specifying the throughput characteristic of the computer system for processing transactions when there is no data contention. A solution method based on decomposition is developed to analyze the system, and also used as the basis of an iterative scheme with reduced computational cost. The analysis to estimate the probability of lock conflicts and deadlocks is based on the mean number of locks held by transactions. These probabilities are used to derive the state transition probabilities for the Markov chain specifying the transitions among the system states. The decomposition solution method and the associated iterative scheme are shown to be more accurate than previously defined methods for dynamic locking through validation against simulation results. Several important conclusions regarding the behavior of dynamic locking systems are derived from parametric studies.

A transaction processing system with two-phase dynamic locking with the no waiting policy (DLNW) for concurrency control is considered. In this method, transactions making conflicting lock requests are aborted and restarted rather than blocked, thereby eliminating blocking delays (and deadlocks), but making it susceptible to cyclic restarts. Cyclic restarts are dealt with by delaying the restart of a transaction encountering a lock conflict or replacing it with a new transaction. Analytic solution methods for evaluating the performance of the variants of the DLNW method are described. The analytic methods, validated against simulation and shown to be acceptably accurate, are used to study the effect of the following parameters on system performance: transaction size and its distribution, degree of concurrency, the throughput characteristic of the computer system, and the mixture of read-only query and update transactions. A comparison of the DLNW and dynamic locking with waiting (DLW) methods shows that DLW provides higher throughput than DLNW, except when there is no hardware resource contention and conflicted transactions can be replaced by new transactions. The DLNW method outperforms the time-stamp ordering method, as observed from simulation results as well as case by case analyses of possible scenarios.>

The effect of concurrency control methods on the performance of computer systems is analyzed in the context of a centralized database with a static lock request policy, i.e., database transactions should acquire all locks before their activation. In the lock conflict model the L locks required by each transaction are uniformly distributed over the N locks in the database. The computer system is modelled as a queueing network. Two scheduling policies for transaction activation are considered: FCFS with and without skip. In each case the scheduling overhead for scanning the blocked transactions is taken into account. The number of transactions to be scanned is limited by a window size parameter. The system is analyzed using a hierarchical decomposition method, where the highest level model yields the mean user response time. The results of the approximate solution are validated using a detailed simulation, which shows that the analysis based on no resampling of locks is quite accurate and outperforms the simplified analysis with resampling of locks in accuracy. The effect of varying the values of parameters such as transaction size, granularity of locking, scheduling discipline for transaction activation, scheduling overhead, and window size on system performance is investigated.