Multilevel atomicity—a new correctness criterion for database concurrency control

Multilevel atomicity, a new correctness criteria for database concurrency control, is defined. It weakens the usual notion of serializability by permitting controlled interleaving among transactions. It appears to be especially suitable for applications in which the set of transactions has a natural hierarchical structure based on the hierarchical structure of an organization. A characterization for multilevel atomicity, in terms of the absence of cycles in a dependency relation among transaction steps, is given. Some remarks are made concerning implementation.

[1]  E. B. Moss,et al.  Nested Transactions: An Approach to Reliable Distributed Computing , 1985 .

[2]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  On Describing the Behavior and Implementation of Distributed Systems , 1979, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[3]  Philip A. Bernstein,et al.  Concurrency Control in Distributed Database Systems , 1986, CSUR.

[4]  Barbara Liskov,et al.  Guardians and actions: linguistic support for robust, distributed programs , 1982, POPL '82.

[5]  Irving L. Traiger,et al.  Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency in a Shared Data Base , 1998, IFIP Working Conference on Modelling in Data Base Management Systems.

[6]  Brian Randell.  System structure for software fault tolerance , 1975 .

[7]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Global States of a Distributed System , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[8]  Barbara Liskov,et al.  Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs , 1983, TOPL.

[9]  Daniel J. Rosenkrantz,et al.  System level concurrency control for distributed database systems , 1978, TODS.

[10]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  Using semantic knowledge for transaction processing in a distributed database , 1983, TODS.

[11]  Brian Randell.  System Structure for Software Fault Tolerance , 1975, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[12]  Irving L. Traiger,et al.  The notions of consistency and predicate locks in a database system , 1976, CACM.

[13]  David P. Reed,et al.  Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system , 1978 .

[14]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Concurrency control for resilient nested transactions , 1983, PODS '83.

[15]  Leslie Lamport.  Towards a theory of correctness of multi-user database systems , 1976 .