Title: Extending Speculation for Improving the
Performance of Read-only Transactions


Authors: T.Ragunathan  and P.Krishna Reddy (Advisor) 

Center for Data Engineering
International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-H), 
Hyderabad, India
E-mail: pkreddy@iiit.ac.in

Conference/Workshop:  

EDBT PhD Workshop (held with 11th International Conference 
on Extending Database Technology March 25-29 2008, Nantes, 
France), Nantes, France, March 25, 2008. 


Abstract: This paper presents an ongoing Ph.D. thesis work which aims at
improving the performance of read-only transactions (ROTs) in
database systems using the notion of speculation. In the literature,
speculative locking approach has been proposed to improve the
transaction processing performance in online transaction
processing environments. In this thesis, we have proposed two
protocols to improve the performance of ROTs, by making
appropriate modifications to the existing speculative locking
protocol. The proposed protocols process ROTs without any data
currency and correctness issues. The simulation results show that
the proposed protocols improve the throughput performance
significantly over two-phase locking (2PL) and snapshot isolation
(SI)-based approaches with manageable extra processing
resources.