Static Conflict Analysis of Transaction Programs

Abstract

Transaction programs are comprised of read and write operations issued against the database. In a shared database system, one transaction program conflicts with another if it reads or writes data that another transaction program has written. This thesis presents a semi-automatic technique for pairwise static conflict analysis of embedded transaction programs. The analysis predicts whether a given pair of programs will conflict when executed against the database. There are several potential applications of this technique, the most obvious being transaction concurrency control in systems where it is not necessary to support arbitrary, dynamic queries and updates. By analyzing transactions in such systems before the transactions are run, it is possible to reduce or eliminate the need for locking or other dynamic concurrency control schemes.