Introduction to Database Concurrency

DATABASE CONCURRENCY: - Database concurrency is the particular situation when a single database is being accessed by multiple programs. Databases, by design in most cases are shared resources, but in this case, they are shared across multiple applications.
Database concurrency controls ensure that transactions occur in an ordered fashion. The main job of these controls is to protect transactions issued by different users/applications from the effects of each other. They must preserve the four characteristics of database transactions: atomicity, isolation, consistency and durability. Concurrency control is one of the main issues in the study of real time database systems. In addition to satisfying consistency requirements as in traditional database systems, a real time transaction processing system must also satisfy timing constraints.

Conflicts between transactions can be detected in two ways.
Pessimistic method detects conflicts before making access to the data object. When a transaction requests access to some data item, the concurrency control manager will examine this request and will determine whether to grant the request or not.
Optimistic schemes are designed to get rid of the locking overhead. They are optimistic in the sense that they take into account the explicit assumption that conflicts among transactions are rare events. The task of concurrency control is deferred until the end of transaction when some checking for potential conflicts has to take place and will be resolved accordingly, taking into consideration the amount of progress that has been done and the nature of conflict with transactions.
When concurrency control detects a conflict among some concurrent transactions accessing the same object, a conflict resolution mechanism needs to be put on. Concurrency control manager decides which transaction (victim) to penalize (the lock holder or the requester) and chooses an appropriate action and suitable timing. Two possible actions are most used: Blocking (wait) and abort (restart). In pessimistic concurrency control either blocking or abort can be used to resolve the conflict. However, in optimistic concurrency control only aborting is appropriate since conflict has been detected after the transaction has accessed the data object and performed some computation.

OPTIMISTIC CONCURRENCY CONTROL : The basic idea of an optimistic concurrency control mechanism is that the execution of a transaction consists of three phases: read, validation and write phases. For all optimistic concurrency control (OCC) schemes a conflict is detected after the data object has been accessed. In the OCC, conflict detection and resolution are both done at the certification time when a transaction completes its execution; it requests the concurrency control manager to validate all its accessed data objects. If it has not yet been marked for abort, it enters the commit phase where it writes all its updates to the database.