Exploiting Concurrency in a DBMS Implementation for Production Systems

An important aspect of integration of AI and DBMS technology is identifying functional similarities in database processing and reasoning with rules. In this paper, we focus on applying concurrency techniques to rule-based production systems. We tailor DBMS concurrent execution to a production system environment and investigate the resulting concurrent execution strategies for productions. This research is in conjunction with a novel DBMS mechanism for testing if the left hand side conditions of productions are satisfied. This set-oriented mechanism uses a special data structure implemented using relational tables. To demonstrate the equivalence of a serial and a concurrent (interleaved) execution strategy, for a set of productions, we assume a locking scheme to enforce serializability and specify what locks must be obtained. We define a logical commit point for a production. After this point the execution of a production is independent of all other (executing) productions. We compare the number of possible serial and parallel execution schedules.