The Group Paradigm for Concurrency Control Protocols

The authors propose a paradigm for developing, describing, and proving the correctness of concurrency control protocols for replicated databases in the presence of failures or communication restrictions. The approach used is to hierarchically divide the problem of achieving one-copy serializability by introducing the notion of a 'group' that is a higher level of abstraction than transactions. Instead of dealing with the overall problem, the paradigm breaks it into two simpler ones: (1) a local policy for each group that ensures a total order of all transactions in that group; and (2) a global policy that ensures a correct serialization of all groups. The paradigm is used to demonstrate the similarities between several concurrency control protocols by comparing the way they achieve correctness. >