Simulation studies on concurrency control in parallel transaction processing systems

Parallel transaction processing (TP) systems have great potential to serve the ever-increasing demands for high transaction processing rate. This potential, however, may not be reached due to the concurrency control (CC) requirements. In this paper a simulation system for shared-nothing parallel TP systems was presented, which aims at, but is not restricted to, the studies of the CC methods. A distributed locking-based CC method called LW DC_k (local wait-depth control) was also proposed for overcoming the drawbacks of the widely-used two-phase locking (2PL) CC method. LW DC_k was compared with 2PL and the well-known DWDL (distributed wait-depth limited) CC methods based on the presented simulation system. The application of this simulation system demonstrated its effectiveness. Simulation studies indicated also that the proposed method outperforms 2PL and DWDL.