Transactions Processing

and
Concurrency Control
 Outline
• Transaction Concept
• Transaction State
• Concurrent Executions
• Serializability
• Recoverability
• Implementation of Isolation
• Transaction Definition in SQL
• Testing for Serializability
• Lock-Based Protocols
• Timestamp-Based Protocols
• Validation-Based Protocols
• Multiple Granularity
• Multiversion Schemes
• Insert and Delete Operations
• Concurrency in Index Structures
 Transaction Concept
• A transaction is a unit of program execution that
accesses and possibly updates various data items
• E.g., transaction to transfer $50 from account A
to account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
• Two main issues to deal with:
– Failures of various kinds, such as hardware
failures and system crashes
– Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
 Required Properties of a Transaction
• Consider a transaction to transfer $50 from account A to
account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
• Atomicity requirement
– If the transaction fails after step 3 and before step 6,
money will be “lost” leading to an inconsistent
database state
• Failure could be due to software or hardware
– The system should ensure that updates of a partially
executed transaction are not reflected in the database
• Durability requirement: once notified about completion of the
transaction the updates must persist even if there are software or
hardware failures
• Consistency requirement:
– The sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of the transaction
• In general, Consistency requirements include
 Explicitly specified integrity constraints such as primary keys and
foreign keys
 Implicit integrity constraints
– e.g., sum of balances of all accounts, minus sum of loan
amounts must equal value of cash-in-hand
• A transaction, when starting to execute, must see a consistent
database.
• During transaction execution the database may be temporarily
inconsistent
• When the transaction completes successfully the database must be
consistent
– Erroneous transaction logic can lead to inconsistency
• Isolation requirement — if between steps 3 and 6 (of the fund
transfer transaction), another transaction T2 is allowed to access
the partially updated database, it will see an inconsistent database
(the sum A+B will be less than it should be)
T1 T2
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
read(A), read(B), print(A+B)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
• Isolation can be ensured trivially by running transactions serially
– One after the other
• However, executing multiple transactions concurrently has
significant benefits
 ACID Properties
• A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and
possibly updates various data items
• To preserve the integrity of data the database system must ensure:
• Atomicity: Either all operations of the transaction are properly
reflected in the database or none
• Consistency: Execution of a transaction in isolation preserves the
consistency of the database
• Isolation: Although multiple transactions may execute concurrently,
each transaction must be unaware of other concurrently executing
transactions. Intermediate transaction results must be hidden from
other concurrently executed transactions
– That is, for every pair of transactions Ti and Tj, it appears to Ti that
either Tj, finished execution before Ti started, or Tj started
execution after Ti finished.
• Durability: After a transaction completes successfully, the changes it
has made to the database persist, even if there are system failures
 Transaction State
• Active – the initial state; the transaction stays in
this state while it is executing
• Partially committed – after the final statement has
been executed
• Failed -- after the discovery that normal execution
can no longer proceed
• Aborted – after the transaction has been rolled
back and the database restored to its state prior to
the start of the transaction
 Two options after it has been aborted
– Restart the transaction
• can be done only if no internal logical error
– Kill the transaction
• Committed – after successful completion
 Concurrent Executions
• Multiple transactions are allowed to run
concurrently in the system
• Advantages are:
– Increased processor and disk utilization, leading to
better transaction throughput
• E.g. one transaction can be using the CPU while another is
reading from or writing to the disk
– Reduced average response time for transactions: short
transactions need not wait behind long ones
• Concurrency control schemes – mechanisms to
achieve isolation
– That is, to control the interaction among the concurrent
transactions in order to prevent them from destroying
the consistency of the database
 Schedules
• Schedule – a sequences of instructions that specify
the chronological order in which instructions of
concurrent transactions are executed
– A schedule for a set of transactions must consist of all
instructions of those transactions
– Must preserve the order in which the instructions
appear in each individual transaction
• A transaction that successfully completes its
execution will have a commit instructions as the
last statement
– By default transaction assumed to execute commit
instruction as its last step
• A transaction that fails to successfully complete its
execution will have an abort instruction as the last
statement
 Schedule 1
• Let T1 transfer $50 from A to B, and T2 transfer 10% of the balance from A to B
• An example of a serial schedule in which T1 is followed by T2:
 Schedule 2
• A serial schedule in which T2 is followed by T1:
 Schedule 3
• Let T1 and T2 be the transactions defined previously. The following
schedule is not a serial schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1

Note -- In schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum “A + B” is preserved.

 Schedule 4
• The following concurrent schedule does not preserve the sum
of “A + B”
 Serializability
• Basic Assumption – Each transaction preserves
database consistency
• Thus, serial execution of a set of transactions
preserves database consistency
• A (possibly concurrent) schedule is serializable if
it is equivalent to a serial schedule
• Different forms of schedule equivalence give
rise to the notions of:
1.Conflict Serializability
2.View Serializability
 Simplified view of transactions
• We ignore operations other than read and
write instructions
• We assume that transactions may perform
arbitrary computations on data in local buffers
in between reads and writes
• Our simplified schedules consist of only read
and write instructions
 Conflicting Instructions
• Let li and lj be two Instructions of transactions Ti and Tj respectively.
Instructions li and lj conflict if and only if there exists some item Q
accessed by both li and lj, and at least one of these instructions
wrote Q.
1. li = read(Q), lj = read(Q) // li and lj don’t conflict
2.li = read(Q), lj = write(Q) // They conflict
3.li = write(Q), lj = read(Q) // They conflict
4. li = write(Q), lj = write(Q) // They conflict
• Intuitively, a conflict between li and lj forces a (logical) temporal
order between them
– If li and lj are consecutive in a schedule and they do not conflict,
their results would remain the same even if they had been
interchanged in the schedule
 Conflict Serializability
• If a schedule S can be transformed into a
schedule S’ by a series of swaps of non-
conflicting instructions, we say that S and S’
are conflict equivalent
• We say that a schedule S is conflict serializable
if it is conflict equivalent to a serial schedule
 Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
• Schedule 3 can be transformed into Schedule 6 -- a serial
schedule where T2 follows T1, by a series of swaps of non-
conflicting instructions
• Therefore, Schedule 3 is conflict serializable

Schedule 3 Schedule 6
 Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
• Example of a schedule that is not conflict serializable:

• We are unable to swap instructions in the above

schedule to obtain either the serial schedule < T3, T4 >,
or the serial schedule < T4, T3 >.
 Precedence Graph
• Consider some schedule of a set of transactions T1,
T2, ..., Tn
• Precedence graph — a direct graph where the vertices
are the transactions (names)
• We draw an arc from Ti to Tj if the two transaction
conflict, and Ti accessed the data item on which the
conflict arose earlier
• We may label the arc by the item that was accessed
• Example

o r d
ros sw
C
 Testing for Conflict Serializability
• A schedule is conflict serializable if and only
if its precedence graph is acyclic
• Cycle-detection algorithms exist which take
order n2 time, where n is the number of
vertices in the graph
• Better algorithms take order n + e where e is
the number of edges
• If precedence graph is acyclic, the
serializability order can be obtained by a
topological sorting of the graph
– That is, a linear order consistent with the
partial order of the graph
– For example, a serializability order for the
schedule (a) would be one of either (b) or
(c)
–
 Recoverable Schedules
• Recoverable schedule — if a transaction Tj reads a data item
previously written by a transaction Ti , then the commit operation
of Ti must appear before the commit operation of Tj
• The following schedule is not recoverable if T9 commits
immediately after the read(A) operation

• If T8 should abort, T9 would have read (and possibly shown to the

user) an inconsistent database state. Hence, database must
ensure that schedules are recoverable
 Cascading Rollbacks
• Cascading rollback – a single transaction failure leads to
a series of transaction rollbacks. Consider the following
schedule where none of the transactions has yet
committed (so the schedule is recoverable)

If T10 fails, T11 and T12 must also be rolled back

• Can lead to the undoing of a significant amount of work
 Cascadeless Schedules
• Cascadeless schedules — for each pair of
transactions Ti and Tj such that Tj reads a data
item previously written by Ti, the commit
operation of Ti appears before the read
operation of Tj
• Every cascadeless schedule is also recoverable
• It is desirable to restrict the schedules to those
that are cascadeless
• Example of a schedule that is NOT cascadeless
 Concurrency Control
• A database must provide a mechanism that will ensure
that all possible schedules are both:
– Conflict serializable
– Recoverable and preferably cascadeless
• A policy in which only one transaction can execute at a
time generates serial schedules, but provides a poor
degree of concurrency
• Concurrency-control schemes tradeoff between the
amount of concurrency they allow and the amount of
overhead that they incur
• Testing a schedule for serializability after it has executed
is a little too late!
– Tests for serializability help us understand why a
concurrency control protocol is correct
• Goal – to develop concurrency control protocols that
will assure serializability
 Weak Levels of Consistency
• Some applications are willing to live with weak
levels of consistency, allowing schedules that
are not serializable
– E.g., a read-only transaction that wants to get an
approximate total balance of all accounts
– E.g., database statistics computed for query
optimization can be approximate
– Such transactions need not be serializable with
respect to other transactions
• Tradeoff accuracy for performance
 Levels of Consistency in SQL-92
• Serializable — default
• Repeatable read — only committed records to be read, repeated
reads of same record must return same value. However, a
transaction may not be serializable – it may find some records
inserted by a transaction but not find others
• Read committed — only committed records can be read, but
successive reads of record may return different (but committed)
values
• Read uncommitted — even uncommitted records may be read
 Lower degrees of consistency useful for gathering approximate
information about the database
 Warning: some database systems do not ensure serializable
schedules by default
o E.g., Oracle and PostgreSQL by default support a level of
consistency called snapshot isolation (not part of the SQL
standard)
 Transaction Definition in SQL
• Data manipulation language must include a
construct for specifying the set of actions that
comprise a transaction
• In SQL, a transaction begins implicitly
• A transaction in SQL ends by:
– Commit work commits current transaction and begins
a new one
– Rollback work causes current transaction to abort
• In almost all database systems, by default, every
SQL statement also commits implicitly if it
executes successfully
– Implicit commit can be turned off by a database
directive
• E.g. in JDBC, connection.setAutoCommit(false);
Other Notions of Serializability
 View Serializability
• Let S and S´ be two schedules with the same set of transactions. S
and S´ are view equivalent if the following three conditions are
met, for each data item Q,
1. If in schedule S, transaction Ti reads the initial value of Q, then in
schedule S’ also transaction Ti must read the initial value of Q
2. If in schedule S transaction Ti executes read(Q), and that value
was produced by transaction Tj (if any), then in schedule S’ also
transaction Ti must read the value of Q that was produced by the
same write(Q) operation of transaction Tj
3. The transaction (if any) that performs the final write(Q)
operation in schedule S must also perform the final write(Q)
operation in schedule S’
• As can be seen, view equivalence is also based purely on reads and
writes alone
 View Serializability (Cont.)
• A schedule S is view serializable if it is view equivalent to a
serial schedule
• Every conflict serializable schedule is also view serializable
• Below is a schedule which is view-serializable but not conflict
serializable

• What serial schedule is above equivalent to?

• Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict serializable
has blind writes
 Test for View Serializability
• The precedence graph test for conflict serializability cannot be
used directly to test for view serializability
– Extension to test for view serializability has cost
exponential in the size of the precedence graph
• The problem of checking if a schedule is view serializable falls
in the class of NP-complete problems
– Thus, existence of an efficient algorithm is extremely
unlikely
• However ,practical algorithms that just check some sufficient
conditions for view serializability can still be used
 More Complex Notions of Serializability
• The schedule below produces the same outcome as the serial
schedule < T1, T5 >, yet is not conflict equivalent or view equivalent
to it

• If we start with A = 1000 and B = 2000, the final result is 960 and
2040
• Determining such equivalence requires analysis of operations
other than read and write