Optimistic versus pessimistic concurrency control mechanisms in database management systems

摘要

Concurrency control mechanisms are necessary to preserve database integrity in a multi-user environment. Two kinds of concurrency control mechanisms are considered in this paper, namely optimistic and pessimistic ones. Optimistic concurrency control is based on the idea of conflicts and transaction restart while pessimistic concurrency control uses locking as the basic serialization mechanism. Analytic and simulation models of both mechanisms were developed in order to compare them as far as transaction response time is concerned. These results take into consideration parameters such as transaction arrival rate, number of database resources accessed per transaction, size of the database, system processing rate and degree of multiprogramming.