Distributed concurrency control
Distributed concurrency control is the concurrency control of a system distributed over a computer network.
In database systems and transaction processing (transaction management) distributed concurrency control refers primarily to the concurrency control of a distributed database. It also refers to the concurrency control in a multidatabase environment (e.g., a federated database, or Grid computing or Cloud computing environments; see also global concurrency control). A major goal for distributed concurrency control is (distributed) serializability (or global serializability for multidatabase systems). Distributed concurrency control poses special challenges beyond centralized one, primarily due to communication and computer latency. It often requires special techniques, like distributed lock manager over fast computer networks with low latency, like switched fabric (e.g., InfiniBand).
The most common distributed concurrency control technique is strong strict two-phase locking (SS2PL, also named rigorousness), which is also a common centralized concurrency control technique. SS2PL provides both the serializability, strictness, and commitment ordering properties. Strictness, a special case of recoverability, is utilized for effective recovery from failure, and commitment ordering allows participating in a general solution for global serializability. For large-scale distribution and complex transactions, distributed locking's typical heavy performance penalty (due to delays, latency) can be saved by using the atomic commitment protocol, which is needed in a distributed database for (distributed) transactions' atomicity (e.g., 2PC, or a simpler one in a reliable system), together with some local commitment ordering variant (e.g., local SS2PL) instead of distributed locking, to achieve global serializability in the entire system (this technique comprises a distributed serializability protocol). All the commitment ordering theoretical results are applicable whenever atomic commitment is utilized over partitioned, distributed recoverable (transactional) data, including automatic distributed deadlock resolution (see Distributed serializability and CO in Commitment ordering). Such technique can be utilized also for a large-scale parallel database, where a single large database, residing on many nodes and using a distributed lock manager, is replaced with a (homogeneous) multidatabase, comprising many relatively small databases (loosely defined; any process that supports transactions over partitioned data and participates in atomic commitment complies), fitting each into a single node, and using commitment ordering (e.g., SS2PL, or SCO) together with some appropriate atomic commitment protocol (without using a distributed lock manager).