research-article

Freedom from Deadlock of Safe Locking Policies

Author:

Mihalis YannakakisAuthors Info & Claims

SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume 11, Issue 2

Pages 391 - 408

https://doi.org/10.1137/0211031

Published: 01 May 1982 Publication History

Abstract

The usual method for preserving the consistency of a database when accessed (read and updated) concurrently by several transactions, is by locking the transactions according to some locking policy; a locking policy that guarantees the preservation of consistency of the database is called safe. Furthermore, if no deadlocks can arise the policy is called deadlock-free. In this paper we are concerned with the freedom from deadlock of safe locking policies. We show that a simple extension of the DAG policy of [Y] is the most general safe and deadlock-free policy for a pair of transactions. We prove however, that it is NP-complete to test whether a set of transactions is not deadlock-free even for the simplest kind of transactions, those that are two-phase locked [E]. We show that for the natural class of safe locking policies, the L-policies, studied in [Y], freedom from deadlock is determined only by the order in which entities are accessed by the transactions and not by the way in which safety is ensured. As a consequence of this fact we develop simple conditions that guarantee the freedom from deadlock of a safe L-policy.

References

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Alfred V. Aho, John E. Hopcroft, Jeffrey D. Ullman, The design and analysis of computer algorithms, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, Mass.-London-Amsterdam, 1975x+470

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Z. Kedem, A. Silberschatz, Controlling concurrency using locking protocols, Proc. of the 20th Annual Symp; on Foundations of Computer Science, 1979, 274–285

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H. T. Kung, C. H. Papadimitriou, An optimality theory of concurrency control for databases, ACM/SIGMOD Intern. Symp. on Management of Data, 1979, 116–126

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Y. E. Lien, P. J. Weinberger, Consistency, concurrency, and crash recovery, ACM/SIGMOD Intern. Symp, on Management of Data, 1978, 9–15

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Christos H. Papadimitriou, Philip A. Bernstein, James B. Rothnie, Some computational problems related to database concurrency control, Proceedings of a Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (Univ. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., 1977), Comput. Sci. Dept., Univ. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont., 1978, 275–282

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B. Samadi, B-trees in a system with multiple users, Information Processing Letters, 5 (1976), 107–112

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Abraham Silberschatz, Zvi Kedem, Consistency in hierarchical database systems, J. Assoc. Comput. Mach., 27 (1980), 72–80

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R. E. Stearns, P. M. Lewis, D. J. Rosenkrantz, Concurrency control for database systems, 17th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (Houston, Tex., 1976), IEEE Comput. Soc., Long Beach, Calif., 1976, 19–32

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Jeffrey D. Ullman, Principles of database systems, Computer Science Press, Rockville, Md., 1980, 379–

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Mihalis Yannakakis, A theory of safe locking policies in database systems, J. Assoc. Comput. Mach., 29 (1982), 718–740

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M. Yannakakis, C. H. Papadimitriou, H. T. Kung, Locking policies: safety and freedom from deadlock, Proc. of the 20th Annual Symp, on Foundations of Computer Science, 1979, 286–297

Cited By

Su JSilberschatz A(1985)Safety of non-well-locked transaction systemsProceedings of the fifth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/6012.15403(47-52)Online publication date: 1-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6012.15403
Buckley GSilberschatz ARosenkrantz DFagin R(1984)Concurrency control in graph protocols by using edge locksProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/588011.588019(45-50)Online publication date: 2-Apr-1984
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588011.588019
Lausen GSoisalon-Soininen EWidmayer PRosenkrantz DFagin R(1984)Maximal concurrency by lockingProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/588011.588018(38-44)Online publication date: 2-Apr-1984
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588011.588018

Index Terms

Freedom from Deadlock of Safe Locking Policies
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Database management system engines
      1. Database transaction processing
        Data locking
      2. Distributed database transactions
        Deadlocks
        Distributed data locking
2. Theory of computation
  1. Theory and algorithms for application domains

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image SIAM Journal on Computing

SIAM Journal on Computing Volume 11, Issue 2

May 1982

208 pages

ISSN:0097-5397

DOI:10.1137/smjcat.1982.11.issue-2

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Copyright © 1982 © Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 1982

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Cited By

Su JSilberschatz A(1985)Safety of non-well-locked transaction systemsProceedings of the fifth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/6012.15403(47-52)Online publication date: 1-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6012.15403
Buckley GSilberschatz ARosenkrantz DFagin R(1984)Concurrency control in graph protocols by using edge locksProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/588011.588019(45-50)Online publication date: 2-Apr-1984
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588011.588019
Lausen GSoisalon-Soininen EWidmayer PRosenkrantz DFagin R(1984)Maximal concurrency by lockingProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/588011.588018(38-44)Online publication date: 2-Apr-1984
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588011.588018

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