Chapter 6: Centralized Recovery (Concurrency Control Book)
With Chapter 6, the Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems book shifts focus from concurrency control to the recovery! This c...| muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
ATC and OSDI ran in parallel. As is tradition, OSDI was single-track; ATC had two parallel tracks. The schedules and papers are online as linked above.| Metadata
This week I was in Boston for ATC/OSDI’25. Downtown Boston is a unique place where two/three-hundred-year-old homes and cobblestone streets are mixed with sleek buildings and biotech towers. The people here look wicked smart and ambitious (although lacking the optimism/cheer of Bay area people). It’s a sharp contrast from Buffalo, where the ambition is more about not standing out.| Metadata
Chapter 7 of the Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems book by Bernstein and Hadzilacos (1987) tackles the distributed commit problem: ensuring atomic commit across a set of distributed sites that may fail independently.| Metadata
With Chapter 6, the Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems book shifts focus from concurrency control to the recovery! This c...| muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
So it goes: your system is purring like a tiger, devouring requests, until, without warning, it slumps into existential dread. Not a crash. Not a bang. A quiet, self-sustaining collapse. The system doesn’t stop. It just refuses to get better. Metastable failure is what happens when the feedback loops in the system go feral. Retries pile up, queues overflow, recovery stalls. Everything runs but nothing improves. The system is busy and useless.| Metadata
Chapter 2 of Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems (1987) by Bernstein, Hadzilacos, and Goodman is a foundational treatment ...| muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
Chapter 5 of Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems (1987) introduces multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), a fundamental advance over single-version techniques. Instead of overwriting data, each write operation creates a new version of the data item. Readers can access older committed versions without blocking concurrent writes or being blocked by concurrent writes.| Metadata
Chapter 4 of the Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems book (1987) opens with a sentence that doesn't quite pass the grammar test: "In this chapter we will examine two scheduling techniques that do not use locks, timestamp ordering (TO) and serialization graph testing (SGT)." That comma is trying to do the job of a colon and failing at it. Precision matters, more so in technical writing.| Metadata
Chapter 3 presents two-phase locking (2PL). Remember I told you in Chapter 2: Serializability Theory that the discussion is very scheduler-centric? Well, this is a deeper dive into the scheduler, using 2PL as the concurrency control mechanism. The chapter examines the design trade-offs in scheduler behavior, proves the correctness of basic 2PL, dissects how deadlocks arise and are handled, and discusses many variations and implementation issues.| Metadata
