A real-time database system contains base data items which record and model a physical, real-world environment. For better decision support, base data items are summarized and correlated to derive views. These base data and views are accessed by application transactions to generate the ultimate actions taken by the system. As the environment changes, updates are applied to base data, which subsequently trigger view recomputations. There are thus three types of activities: base data update, view recomputation, and transaction execution. In a real-time database system, two timing constraints need to be enforced. We require that transactions meet their deadlines (transaction timeliness) and read fresh data (data timeliness). In this paper, we define the concept of absolute and relative temporal consistency from the perspective of transactions for discrete data objects. We address the important issue of transaction scheduling among the three types of activities such that the two timing requirements can be met. We also discuss how a real-time database system should be designed to enforce different levels of temporal consistency.

Recent advances in mobile computing and mobile communication technology have led to the emergence of many innovative mobile computing applications. Some of them require providing support to location-dependent continuous queries (LDCQs) on moving objects. The result of a location-dependent query depends on the current locations of the moving objects. When the query is specified as continuous, the requesting client can get continuously changing results. In order to provide correct and timely results to requesting clients, the locations of moving objects have to be closely monitored. In this paper, we propose an adaptive monitoring method (AMM) for managing the locations of moving objects to maintain the correctness of the results of query evaluation without significantly increasing the wireless bandwidth requirements. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method as compared to plain dead-reckoning (PDR).

Although many efficient concurrency control protocols have been proposed for real-time database systems, they are mainly designed for those systems with a single type of real-time transaction. Due to the very different performance requirements of each type of real-time transaction, these proposed protocols may not be suitable for mixed real-time database systems (MRTDBSs), where different types of real-time transactions, and even non-real-time transactions, may co-exist in the systems at the same time. In this paper, we propose strategies for resolving data conflicts between different types of transactions in a MRTDBS so that their different performance requirements can be achieved and, at the same time, the overall system performance can be improved. The performance of the proposed strategies is evaluated and compared with a real-time optimistic approach. The performance of our proposed conflict resolution methods has also been investigated in a more realistic environment with a limited number of priority levels and disk-resident data items.

A database system contains base data items which record and model a physical, real world environment. For better decision support, base data items are summarized and correlated to derive views. These base data and views are accessed by application transactions to generate the ultimate actions taken by the system. As the environment changes, updates are applied to the base data, which subsequently trigger view recomputations. There are thus three types of activities: base data update, view recomputation, and transaction execution. In a real-time system, two timing constrains need to be enforced. We require transactions meet their deadlines (transaction timeliness) and read fresh data (data timeliness). In this paper we define the concept of absolute and relative temporal consistency from the perspective of transactions. We address the important issue of transaction scheduling among the three types of activities such that the two timing requirements can be met. We also discuss how a real-time database system should be designed to enforce different levels of temporal consistency.