UNIT -6 DBMS
Lock-Based Protocols
• A lock is a mechanism to control concurrent access to a data item
• Data items can be locked in two modes :
1. exclusive (X) mode. Data item can be both read as well as
written. X-lock is requested using lock-X instruction.
2. shared (S) mode. Data item can only be read. S-lock is
requested using lock-S instruction.
• Lock requests are made to concurrency-control manager. Transaction can proceed only after
request is granted.
• Lock-compatibility matrix
• A transaction may be granted a lock on an item if the requested lock is compatible with locks
already held on the item by other transactions
• Any number of transactions can hold shared locks on an item,
– but if any transaction holds an exclusive on the item no other transaction may hold any
lock on the item.
• If a lock cannot be granted, the requesting transaction is made to wait till all incompatible locks
held by other transactions have been released. The lock is then granted.
• Example of a transaction performing locking:
T2: lock-S(A);
read (A);
unlock(A);
lock-S(B);
read (B);
unlock(B);
display(A+B)
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• Locking as above is not sufficient to guarantee serializability — if A and B get updated in-
between the read of A and B, the displayed sum would be wrong.
• A locking protocol is a set of rules followed by all transactions while requesting and releasing
locks. Locking protocols restrict the set of possible schedules.
Pitfalls of Lock-Based Protocols
• Consider the partial schedule
• Neither T3 nor T4 can make progress — executing lock-S(B) causes T4 to wait for T3 to release its
lock on B, while executing lock-X(A) causes T3 to wait for T4 to release its lock on A.
• Such a situation is called a deadlock.
– To handle a deadlock one of T3 or T4 must be rolled back
and its locks released.
• The potential for deadlock exists in most locking protocols. Deadlocks are a necessary evil.
• Starvation is also possible if concurrency control manager is badly designed. For example:
– A transaction may be waiting for an X-lock on an item, while a sequence of other
transactions request and are granted an S-lock on the same item.
– The same transaction is repeatedly rolled back due to deadlocks.
• Concurrency control manager can be designed to prevent starvation.
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UNIT -6 DBMS
***The Two-Phase Locking Protocol :
• This is a protocol which ensures conflict-serializable schedules.
• Phase 1: Growing Phase
– transaction may obtain locks
– transaction may not release locks
• Phase 2: Shrinking Phase
– transaction may release locks
– transaction may not obtain locks
• The protocol assures serializability. It can be proved that the transactions can be serialized in the
order of their lock points (i.e. the point where a transaction acquired its final lock).
• Two-phase locking does not ensure freedom from deadlocks
• Cascading roll-back is possible under two-phase locking. To avoid this, follow a modified
protocol called strict two-phase locking. Here a transaction must hold all its exclusive locks till it
commits/aborts.
• Rigorous two-phase locking is even stricter: here all locks are held till commit/abort. In this
protocol transactions can be serialized in the order in which they commit.
• Two-phase locking does not ensure freedom from deadlocks
• Cascading roll-back is possible under two-phase locking. To avoid this, follow a modified
protocol called strict two-phase locking. Here a transaction must hold all its exclusive locks till it
commits/aborts.
• Rigorous two-phase locking is even stricter: here all locks are held till commit/abort. In this
protocol transactions can be serialized in the order in which they commit.
• There can be conflict serializable schedules that cannot be obtained if two-phase locking is used.
• However, in the absence of extra information (e.g., ordering of access to data), two-phase
locking is needed for conflict serializability in the following sense:
Given a transaction Ti that does not follow two-phase locking, we can find a transaction Tj that uses
two-phase locking, and a schedule for Ti and Tj that is not conflict serializable.
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Lock Conversions
• Two-phase locking with lock conversions:
– First Phase:
can acquire a lock-S on item
can acquire a lock-X on item
can convert a lock-S to a lock-X (upgrade)
– Second Phase:
• can release a lock-S
• can release a lock-X
• can convert a lock-X to a lock-S (downgrade)
• This protocol assures serializability. But still relies on the programmer to insert the various
locking instructions.
Lock Table
o Black rectangles indicate granted locks, white ones indicate waiting requests
o Lock table also records the type of lock granted or requested
o New request is added to the end of the queue of requests for the data item, and
granted if it is compatible with all earlier locks
o Unlock requests result in the request being deleted, and later requests are
checked to see if they can now be granted
o If transaction aborts, all waiting or granted requests of the transaction are
deleted
o lock manager may keep a list of locks held by each transaction, to implement
this efficiently
***Graph-Based Protocols
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• Graph-based protocols are an alternative to two-phase locking
• Impose a partial ordering ® on the set D = {d1, d2 ,..., dh} of all data items.
– If di ® dj then any transaction accessing both di and dj must access di before accessing dj.
– Implies that the set D may now be viewed as a directed acyclic graph, called a database
graph.
• The tree-protocol is a simple kind of graph protocol.
***Tree Protocol
1. Only exclusive locks are allowed.
2. The first lock by Ti may be on any data item. Subsequently, a data Q can be locked by Ti only if
the parent of Q is currently locked by Ti.
3. Data items may be unlocked at any time.
4. A data item that has been locked and unlocked by Ti cannot subsequently be relocked by Ti
Timestamp-Based Protocols
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• Each transaction is issued a timestamp when it enters the system. If an old transaction Ti has
time-stamp TS(Ti), a new transaction Tj is assigned time-stamp TS(Tj) such that TS(Ti) <TS(Tj).
• The protocol manages concurrent execution such that the time-stamps determine the
serializability order.
• In order to assure such behavior, the protocol maintains for each data Q two timestamp values:
W-timestamp(Q) is the largest time-stamp of any transaction that executed write(Q) successfully.
R-timestamp(Q) is the largest time-stamp of any transaction that executed read(Q) successfully.
The timestamp ordering protocol ensures that any conflicting read and write operations are executed in
timestamp order.
Suppose a transaction Ti issues a read(Q)
If TS(Ti) £ W-timestamp(Q), then Ti needs to read a value of Q that was already overwritten.
Hence, the read operation is rejected, and Ti is rolled back.
If TS(Ti)³ W-timestamp(Q), then the read operation is executed, and R-timestamp(Q) is set to
max(R-timestamp(Q), TS(Ti)).
Suppose that transaction Ti issues write(Q).
If TS(Ti) < R-timestamp(Q), then the value of Q that Ti is producing was needed previously, and
the system assumed that that value would never be produced.
Hence, the write operation is rejected, and Ti is rolled back.
If TS(Ti) < W-timestamp(Q), then Ti is attempting to write an obsolete value of Q.
Hence, this write operation is rejected, and Ti is rolled back.
Otherwise, the write operation is executed, and W-timestamp(Q) is set to TS(Ti).
A partial schedule for several data items for transactions with
timestamps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
write(Z)
Correctness of Timestamp-Ordering Protocol
• The timestamp-ordering protocol guarantees serializability since all the arcs in the precedence
graph are of the form:
Thus, there will be no cycles in the precedence graph
• Timestamp protocol ensures freedom from deadlock as no transaction ever waits.
• But the schedule may not be cascade-free, and may not even be recoverable.
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****Thomas’ Write Rule
• Modified version of the timestamp-ordering protocol in which obsolete write operations may
be ignored under certain circumstances.
• When Ti attempts to write data item Q, if TS(Ti) < W-timestamp(Q), then Ti is attempting to write
an obsolete value of {Q}.
– Rather than rolling back Ti as the timestamp ordering protocol would have done, this
{write} operation can be ignored.
• Otherwise this protocol is the same as the timestamp ordering protocol.
• Thomas' Write Rule allows greater potential concurrency.
– Allows some view-serializable schedules that are not conflict-serializable.
Validation-Based Protocol
• Execution of transaction Ti is done in three phases.
1. Read and execution phase: Transaction Ti writes only to
temporary local variables
2. Validation phase: Transaction Ti performs a ``validation test''
to determine if local variables can be written without violating
serializability.
3. Write phase: If Ti is validated, the updates are applied to the
database; otherwise, Ti is rolled back.
• The three phases of concurrently executing transactions can be interleaved, but each
transaction must go through the three phases in that order.
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– Assume for simplicity that the validation and write phase occur together, atomically and
serially
I.e., only one transaction executes validation/write at a time.
Also called as optimistic concurrency control since transaction executes fully in the hope that all will go
well during validation
Each transaction Ti has 3 timestamps
Start(Ti) : the time when Ti started its execution
Validation(Ti): the time when Ti entered its validation phase
Finish(Ti) : the time when Ti finished its write phase
Serializability order is determined by timestamp given at validation time, to increase concurrency.
Thus TS(Ti) is given the value of Validation(Ti).
This protocol is useful and gives greater degree of concurrency if probability of conflicts is low.
because the serializability order is not pre-decided, and
relatively few transactions will have to be rolled back.
If for all Ti with TS (Ti) < TS (Tj) either one of the following condition holds:
finish(Ti) < start(Tj)
start(Tj) < finish(Ti) < validation(Tj) and the set of data items written by Ti does not intersect with the set
of data items read by Tj.
T hen validation succeeds and Tj can be committed. Otherwise, validation fails and Tj is aborted.
Justification: Either the first condition is satisfied, and there is no overlapped execution, or the second
condition is satisfied and the writes of Tj do not affect reads of Ti since they occur after Ti has finished its
reads.
The writes of Ti do not affect reads of Tj since Tj does not read any item written by Ti.
Schedule Produced by Validation
Example of schedule produced using validation
(validate)
write (B)
write (A)
Multiple Granularity
• Allow data items to be of various sizes and define a hierarchy of data granularities, where the
small granularities are nested within larger ones
• Can be represented graphically as a tree (but don't confuse with tree-locking protocol)
• When a transaction locks a node in the tree explicitly, it implicitly locks all the node's
descendents in the same mode.
• Granularity of locking (level in tree where locking is done):
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– fine granularity (lower in tree): high concurrency, high locking overhead
– coarse granularity (higher in tree): low locking overhead, low concurrency
Example of Granularity Hierarchy
The levels, starting from the coarsest (top) level are
– database
– area
– file
– record
Multiple Granularity Locking Scheme
• Transaction Ti can lock a node Q, using the following rules:
1. The lock compatibility matrix must be observed.
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2. The root of the tree must be locked first, and may be locked in any mode.
3. A node Q can be locked by Ti in S or IS mode only if the parent of Q is currently locked by
Ti in either IX or IS mode.
4. A node Q can be locked by Ti in X, SIX, or IX mode only if the parent of Q is currently
locked by Ti in either IX or SIX mode.
5. Ti can lock a node only if it has not previously unlocked any node (that is, Ti is two-
phase).
6. Ti can unlock a node Q only if none of the children of Q are currently locked by Ti.
• Observe that locks are acquired in root-to-leaf order, whereas they are released in leaf-to-root
order.
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