Design and implementation of a transaction manager for a relational database

Abstract

1vf ulti-user database management systems are in great demand because of the information requirements of our modern industrial society. A clear requirement is that database resources be shared by many users at the same time. Transaction management aims to manage concurrent database access by multiple users while preserving the consistency of the database. In this thesis a single-user relational database management system, REQUIEM, is used as a vehicle to investigate improved methods for achieving this. A module, called the REQUIEM Transaction Manager (RTM), is built on top of the original REQUIEM to achieve a multi-user database management system. The design work of the present thesis is founded upon various techniques for transaction management proposed in published literature which are critically assessed and a mechanism which combines appealing features from existing methodologies. The problems of transaction management considered in this thesis are: 1. concurrency control, 2. granularity control, 3. deadlock control, and 4. recovery control. The RTM is also compared with the transaction management facilities of conventional commercial systems such as DB2, INGRES and ORACLE.