A study of two transaction-processing architectures for distributed real-time data base systems

A real-time data base system (RTDBS) is designed to provide timely response to the transactions of data-intensive applications. Processing a transaction in a distributed RTDBS environment presents the design choice of how to provide access to remote data referenced by the transaction. Satisfaction of the timing constraints of transactions should be the primary factor to be considered in scheduling accesses to remote data. In this article, we describe and analyze two different alternative approaches to this fundamental design decision. With the first alternative, transaction operations are executed at the sites where required data pages reside. The other alternative is based on transmitting data pages wherever they are needed. Although the latter approach is characterized by large message volumes carrying data pages, it is shown in our experiments to perform better than the other approach under most of the work loads and system configurations tested. The performance metric used in the evaluations is the fraction of transactions that satisfy their timing constraints.