Is Distributed Locking Harder?

Abstract The problem of determining whether a set of locked transactions, accessing a distributed database, is guaranteed to produce only serializable schedules is examined. For a pair of transactions, with n steps, it is proved that this concurrency control problem, which is polynomially solvable for centralized databases, is in general coNP-complete. A new graphtheoretic technique is employed and an O(n 2 ) test for the special case of databases distributed between two sites is provided.

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