CHAPTER

23
Parallel and Distributed
Transaction Processing

Solutions for the Practice Exercises of Chapter 23

Practice Exercises

23.1 What are the key differences between a local-area network and a wide-area
network, that affect the design of a distributed database?
23.2 To build a highly available distributed system, you must know what kinds of
failures can occur.

a. List possible types of failure in a distributed system.

23.3 Consider a failure that occurs during 2PC for a transaction. For each possible
failure that you listed in Exercise 23.2a, explain how 2PC ensures transaction
atomicity despite the failure.
23.4 Consider a distributed system with two sites, A and B. Can site A distinguish
among the following?

• B goes down.
• The link between A and B goes down.
• B is extremely overloaded and response time is 100 times longer than nor-
mal.

What implications does your answer have for recovery in distributed systems?
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23.5 The persistent messaging scheme described in this chapter depends on time-
stamps. A drawback is that they can discard received messages only if they are
too old, and may need to keep track of a large number of received messages.
Suggest an alternative scheme based on sequence numbers instead of time-
stamps, that can discard messages more rapidly.
23.6 Explain the difference between data replication in a distributed system and the
maintenance of a remote backup site.
23.7 Give an example where lazy replication can lead to an inconsistent database
state even when updates get an exclusive lock on the primary (master) copy if
data were read from a node other than the master.
23.8 Consider the following deadlock-detection algorithm. When transaction Ti , at
site S1 , requests a resource from Tj , at site S3 , a request message with time-
stamp n is sent. The edge (Ti , Tj , n) is inserted in the local wait-for graph of
S1 . The edge (Ti , Tj , n) is inserted in the local wait-for graph of S3 only if Tj
has received the request message and cannot immediately grant the requested
resource. A request from Ti to Tj in the same site is handled in the usual man-
ner; no timestamps are associated with the edge (Ti , Tj ). A central coordinator
invokes the detection algorithm by sending an initiating message to each site
in the system.
On receiving this message, a site sends its local wait-for graph to the co-
ordinator. Note that such a graph contains all the local information that the
site has about the state of the real graph. The wait-for graph reflects an instan-
taneous state of the site, but it is not synchronized with respect to any other
site.
When the controller has received a reply from each site, it constructs a
graph as follows:
• The graph contains a vertex for every transaction in the system.
• The graph has an edge (Ti , Tj ) if and only if:
° There is an edge (Ti , Tj ) in one of the wait-for graphs.
° An edge (Ti , Tj , n) (for some n) appears in more than one wait-for
graph.
Show that, if there is a cycle in the constructed graph, then the system is in a
deadlock state, and that, if there is no cycle in the constructed graph, then the
system was not in a deadlock state when the execution of the algorithm began.
23.9 Consider the chain-replication protocol, described in Section 23.4.3.2, which
is a variant of the primary-copy protocol.
a. If locking is used for concurrency control, what is the earliest point when
a process can release an exclusive lock after updating a data item?
 Practice Exercises 175

b. While each data item could have its own chain, give two reasons it would
be preferable to have a chain defined at a higher level, such as for each
partition or tablet.
c. How can consensus protocols be used to ensure that the chain is
uniquely determined at any point in time?
23.10 If the primary copy scheme is used for replication, and the primary gets dis-
connected from the rest of the system, a new node may get elected as primary.
But the old primary may not realize it has got disconnected, and may get re-
connected subsequently without realizing that there is a new primary.
a. What problems can arise if the old primary does not realize that a new
one has taken over?
b. How can leases be used to avoid these problems?
c. Would such a situation, where a participant node gets disconnected and
then reconnected without realizing it was disconnected, cause any prob-
lem with the majority or quorum protocols?
23.11 Consider a federated database system in which it is guaranteed that at most
one global transaction is active at any time, and every local site ensures local
serializability.
a. Suggest ways in which the federated database system can ensure that
there is at most one active global transaction at any time.
b. Show by example that it is possible for a nonserializable global schedule
to result despite the assumptions.
23.12 Consider a federated database system in which every local site ensures local
serializability, and all global transactions are read only.
a. Show by example that nonserializable executions may result in such a
system.
b. Show how you could use a ticket scheme to ensure global serializability.
23.13 Suppose you have a large relation r(A, B, C) and a materialized view
v = A γsum(B) (r). View maintenance can be performed as part of each trans-
action that updates r, on a parallel/distributed storage system that supports
transactions across multiple nodes. Suppose the system uses two-phase com-
mit along with a consensus protocol such as Paxos, across geographically dis-
tributed data centers.
a. Explain why it is not a good idea to perform view maintenance as part of
the update transaction, if some values of attribute A are “hot” at certain
points in time, that is, many updates pertain to those values of A.
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b. Explain how operation locking (if supported) could solve this problem.
c. Explain the tradeoffs of using asynchronous view maintenance in this
context.