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The rollback mechanism is critical in crash recovery and debugging, but its security problems have not been adequately addressed. This is justified by the fact that existing solutions always require modifications on target software or only work for specific scenarios. As a consequence, rollback is either neglected or restricted or prohibited in existing systems. In this paper, we systematically characterize security threats of rollback as abnormal states of non-deterministic variables and resumed program points caused by rollback. Based on this, we propose RollSec (for Rollback Security), which provides general measurements including state extracting, recording, and compensating, to maintain correctness of these abnormal states for eliminating rollback threats. RollSec can automatically extract these states based on language-independent information of software as protection targets, which will be monitored during run-time, and compensated to correct states on each rollback without requiring extra modifications or supports of specific architectures. At last, we implement a prototype of RollSec to verify its effectiveness, and conduct performance evaluations which demonstrate that only acceptable overhead is introduced.

Debugging transactions and understanding their execution are of immense importance for developing OLAP applications, to trace causes of errors in production systems, and to audit the operations of a database. However, debugging transactions is hard for several reasons: 1) after the execution of a transaction, its input is no longer available for debugging, 2) internal states of a transaction are typically not accessible, and 3) the execution of a transaction may be affected by concurrently running transactions. We present a debugger for transactions that enables non-invasive, post-mortem debugging of transactions with provenance tracking and supports what-if scenarios (changes to transaction code or data). Using reenactment, a declarative replay technique we have developed, a transaction is replayed over the state of the DB seen by its original execution including all its interactions with concurrently executed transactions from the history. Importantly, our approach uses the temporal database and audit logging capabilities available in many DBMS and does not require any modifications to the underlying database system nor transactional workload., Comment: to appear as "Debugging Transactions and Tracking their Provenance with Reenactment" in PVDLB 2017, vol 10., nr. 12

One of the critical concerns in the current era is information security. Companies are sharing vast online critical data, which exposes their databases to malicious attacks. When protection techniques fail to prevent an attack, recovery is needed. Database recovery is not a straightforward procedure, since the transactions are highly interconnected. Traditional recovery techniques do not consider the interconnection between transactions because this information is not saved anywhere in the log file. Thus, they rollback all the transactions starting from the detected malicious transaction to the end of the log file. Hence, both affected and benign transactions will be rolled back, which is a waste of time. This paper presents an algorithm that works efficiently to assess the damage caused in the database by malicious transaction and recovers it. The proposed algorithm keeps track of the transactions that read from one another and store this information in a single matrix. The experimental results prove that the algorithm is faster than any other existing algorithm in this domain.

An apostate's opinion.

This article explores and names some of the practical approaches used in the implementation of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world that rejects distributed transactions. Topics include the management of fine-grained pieces of application data that may be repartitioned over time as the application grows. Design patterns support sending messages between these repartitionable pieces of data.

Software Transactional Memory (STM) has recently emerged as a promising synchronization abstraction for multicore architectures. State-of-the-art STM algorithms, however, suffer from performance challenges due to contention and spinning on locks during the transaction commit phase. In this paper, we introduce Remote Transaction Commit (or RTC), a mechanism for executing commit phases of STM transactions. RTC dedicates server cores to execute transactional commit phases on behalf of application threads. This approach has two major benefits. First, it decreases the overheads of spinning on locks during commit, such as the number of cache misses, blocking of lock holders, and CAS operations. Second, it enables exploiting the benefits of coarse-grained locking algorithms (simple and fast lock acquisition, reduced false conflicts) and bloom filter-based algorithms (concurrent execution of independent transactions). Our experimental study on a 64-core machine with four sockets shows that RTC solves the problem of performance degradation due to spin locking on both micro-benchmarks (red-black trees), and macro-benchmarks (STAMP), especially when the commit phase is relatively long and when thread contention increases.

The commit processing in a Distributed Real Time Database (DRTDBS) can significantly increase execution time of a transaction. Therefore, designing a good commit protocol is important for the DRTDBS; the main challenge is the adaptation of standard commit protocol into the real time database system and so, decreasing the number of missed transaction in the systems. In these papers we review the basic commit protocols and the other protocols depend on it, for enhancing the transaction performance in DRTDBS. We propose a new commit protocol for reducing the number of transaction that missing their deadline.

Scheduling transactions in a real-time database requires an integrated approach in which the schedule does not only guarantee execution before the deadline, but also maintains data consistency. The problem has been studied under a common framework which considers both concurrency control issues and the real-time constraints in centralized and distributed transaction processing. A real-time transaction processing model has been defined for a centralized system. The proposed protocols use a unified approach to maximize concurrency while meeting real-time constraints at the same time. In order to test the behavior of the model and the proposed protocols, a real-time transaction processing testbed has been developed using discrete event simulation techniques. The results indicate that different protocols work better under different load scenarios and that the overall performance can be significantly enhanced by modifying the underlying system configuration. Among other system and transaction parameters, the effect of data partitioning, buffer management, preemption, disk contention, locking mode and multiprocessing has been studied. For the distributed environment, new concepts of real-time nested transactions and priority propagation have been proposed. Real-time nested transactions incorporate the deadline requirements in the hierarchical structure of nested transactions. Priority propagation addresses the issues related to transaction aborts in real-time nested transaction processing. The notion of priority ceiling has been used to avoid the priority inversion problem. The proposed protocols exhibit freedom from deadlock and have tightly bounded waiting period. Both of these properties make them very suitable for distributed real-time transaction processing environment.

Flash memory has accelerated the architectural evolution of storage systems with its unique characteristics compared to magnetic disks. The no-overwrite property of flash memory naturally supports transactions, a commonly used mechanism in systems to provide consistency. However, existing embedded transaction designs in flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs) either limit the transaction concurrency or introduce high overhead in tracking transaction states. This leads to low or unstable SSD performance. In this paper, we propose a transactional SSD (TxSSD) architecture, LightTx, to enable better concurrency and low overhead. First, LightTx improves transaction concurrency arbitrarily by using a page-independent commit protocol. Second, LightTx tracks the recent updates by leveraging the near-log-structured update property of SSDs and periodically retires dead transactions to reduce the transaction state tracking cost. Experiments show that LightTx achieves nearly the lowest overhead in garbage collection, memory consumption and mapping persistence compared to existing embedded transaction designs. LightTx also provides up to 20.6 percent performance improvement due to improved transaction concurrency.

Transactions are records that contain a set of items about individuals. For example, items browsed by a customer when shopping online form a transaction. Today, many activities are carried out on the Internet, resulting in a large amount of transaction data being collected. Such data are often shared and analyzed to improve business and services, but they also contain private information about individuals that must be protected. Techniques have been proposed to sanitize transaction data before their release, and set-based generalization is one such method. In this article, we study how well set-based generalization can protect transactions. We propose methods to attack set-generalized transactions by exploiting contextual information that is available within the released data. Our results show that set-based generalization may not provide adequate protection for transactions, and up to 70% of the items added into the transactions during generalization to obfuscate original data can be detected by our methods with a precision over 80%.

In distributed transactional database systems deployed over cloud servers, entities cooperate to form proofs of authorizations that are justified by collections of certified credentials. These proofs and credentials may be evaluated and collected over extended time periods under the risk of having the underlying authorization policies or the user credentials being in inconsistent states. It therefore becomes possible for policy-based authorization systems to make unsafe decisions that might threaten sensitive resources. In this paper, we highlight the criticality of the problem. We then define the notion of trusted transactions when dealing with proofs of authorization. Accordingly, we propose several increasingly stringent levels of policy consistency constraints, and present different enforcement approaches to guarantee the trustworthiness of transactions executing on cloud servers. We propose a Two-Phase Validation Commit protocol as a solution, which is a modified version of the basic Two-Phase Validation Commit protocols. We finally analyze the different approaches presented using both analytical evaluation of the overheads and simulations to guide the decision makers to which approach to use.

Many cloud systems provide data stores with limited features, especially they may not provide transactions, or else restrict transactions to a single item. We propose a approach that gives multi-item transactions across heterogeneous data stores, using only a minimal set of features from each store such as single item consistency, conditional update, and the ability to include extra metadata within a value. We offer a client-coordinated transaction protocol that does not need a central coordinating infrastructure. A prototype implementation has been built as a Java library and measured with an extension of YCSB benchmark to exercise multi-item transactions.

As computer systems continue to grow in complexity, the possibilities of failure increase. At the same time, the increase in computer system pervasiveness in day-to-day activities brought along increased expectations on their reliability. This has led to the need for effective and automatic error recovery techniques to resolve failures. Transactions enable the handling of failure propagation over concurrent systems due to dependencies, restoring the system to the point before the failure occurred. However, in various settings, especially when interacting with the real world, reversal is not possible. The notion of compensations has been long advocated as a way of addressing this issue, through the specification of activities which can be executed to undo partial transactions. Still, there is no accepted standard theory; the literature offers a plethora of distinct formalisms and approaches. In this survey, we review the compensations from a theoretical point of view by: (i) giving a historic account of the evolution of compensating transactions; (ii) delineating and describing a number of design options involved; (iii) presenting a number of formalisms found in the literature, exposing similarities and differences; (iv) comparing formal notions of compensation correctness; (v) giving insights regarding the application of compensations in practice; and (vi) discussing current and future research trends in the area., peer-reviewed

In this paper we investigate the problem of providing consistency, availability and durability for web service transactions. We propose an approach that matches the availability of the popular lazy replica update propagation method while increases the durability and consistency. Our replica update propagation method is called the Buddy System, which requires that updates are preserved synchronously in two replicas. Our first implementation schedules fine-grained WS transactions. In these transactions each activity is a low level database operation. Later we consider each transaction as a black box, with only the corresponding metadata, expressed as UML specifications, as transaction semantics. We refer to these WS transactions as coarse-grained WS transactions. The Buddy System is able to handle these course grained WS transactions, using UML stereotypes that allow scheduling semantics to be embedded into the design model. We show that our approach guarantees one-copy serializability, matches the performance of the lazy update propagation methods, and increases durability in the presence of hardware failures.

Today, distributed business systems are used widely, and the consistency of their databases are maintained by the distributed transactions. On the other hand, a great deal of data is often updated in a lump-sum in the business systems. And, since the non-stop service has become general, it is necessary to perform this lump-sum update concurrently with the online transactions that service to users. So, some methods are utilized to avoid the influences on the online transactions, like the mini-batch that splits a lump-sum update into small transactions and executes them one after another. However, in the distributed systems, since it has to be executed by the distributed transactions, there is a problem on the efficiency to update a great deal of data by this method. For this problem, we propose to apply an update method to the distributed systems, which utilizes the records of data about the time to avoid conflicts between the lump-sum update and the online transactions. Moreover, through experiments using a prototype, we confirmed that it can update data more efficiently than the chain of small transactions even in the distributed systems.

Modern applications often operate on data in multiple administrative domains. In this federated setting, participants may not fully trust each other. These distributed applications use transactions as a core mechanism for ensuring reliability and consistency with persistent data. However, the coordination mechanisms needed for transactions can both leak confidential information and allow unauthorized influence. By implementing a simple attack, we show these side channels can be exploited. However, our focus is on preventing such attacks. We explore secure scheduling of atomic, serializable transactions in a federated setting. While we prove that no protocol can guarantee security and liveness in all settings, we establish conditions for sets of transactions that can safely complete under secure scheduling. Based on these conditions, we introduce staged commit, a secure scheduling protocol for federated transactions. This protocol avoids insecure information channels by dividing transactions into distinct stages. We implement a compiler that statically checks code to ensure it meets our conditions, and a system that schedules these transactions using the staged commit protocol. Experiments on this implementation demonstrate that realistic federated transactions can be scheduled securely, atomically, and efficiently., Comment: Technical Report

Shared-nothing architecture has been widely used in distributed databases to achieve good scalability. While it offers superior performance for local transactions, the overhead of processing distributed transactions can degrade the system performance significantly. The key contributor to the degradation is the expensive two-phase commit (2PC) protocol used to ensure atomic commitment of distributed transactions. In this paper, we propose a transaction management scheme called LEAP to avoid the 2PC protocol within distributed transaction processing. Instead of processing a distributed transaction across multiple nodes, LEAP converts the distributed transaction into a local transaction. This benefits the processing locality and facilitates adaptive data repartitioning when there is a change in data access pattern. Based on LEAP, we develop an online transaction processing (OLTP) system, L-Store, and compare it with the state-of-the-art distributed in-memory OLTP system, H-Store, which relies on the 2PC protocol for distributed transaction processing, and H^L-Store, a H-Store that has been modified to make use of LEAP. Results of an extensive experimental evaluation show that our LEAP-based engines are superior over H-Store by a wide margin, especially for workloads that exhibit locality-based data accesses.

We present SPCN, a framework that further extends the benefits of having distributed partially rollbackable (closed-nested) transactions by exploiting their parallel activation. SPCN provides support for executing each closed-nested transaction in parallel with others belonging to the same parent transaction. Their commit sequence is equivalent to the serial commit execution, but parallelism is leveraged to improve performance by reducing the amount of serial network communication. As we show in our evaluation study using 20 nodes on Amazon EC2 and three well-known benchmarks, SPCN provides performance improvement over the original closed nesting, gaining more than 2× in throughput.

In this poster paper, we briefly introduce an effective solution to address the problem of committing transactions enforcing a predefined order. To do that, we overview the design of two algorithms that deploy a cooperative transaction execution that circumvents the transaction isolation constraint in favor of propagating written values among conflicting transactions. A preliminary implementation shows that even in the presence of data conflicts, the proposed algorithms outperform other competitors, significantly.

nowadays, the most controversial issue is transaction in database systems or web services. Specifically, in the area of service-oriented computing, where business transactions always need long periods of time to finish. In the case of a failure rollback, which is the traditional method, it will not be enough and not suitable for handling errors during long running transactions. As a substitute, the most appropriate approach is compensation which is used as an error recovery mechanism. Therefore, transactions that need a long time to complete are programmed as a composition of a set of compensable transactions. This study attempts to design several compensation policies in the long running web transaction especially when the transaction has parallel threads. Meabwhile, one thread in sequence steps of the transaction may fail. This paper also describes and models many different ways to compensate to the thread. Moreover, this study proposes a system to implement creating long running transactions as well as simulating failures by using compensation policies.

Mobile devices are growing day by day, so the mobile database. Transactions from ATM machines are a good example of wireless Transactions. Since these transaction flows using medium as air hence security is a issue till the transaction reaches the Base station from where the transaction is much more secure as compared to wireless network. In this paper a new scheme of securing database transaction is proposed till it reaches the Base station. This is also required to provide security against frequent disconnections (2)(5).

This paper investigates a transaction processing mechanism in a peer to peer database network. A peer to peer database network is a collection of autonomous data sources, called peers, where each peer augments a conventional database management system with an inter-operability layer (i.e. mappings) for sharing data. In this network, each peer independently manages its database and executes queries as well as updates over the related data in other peers. In this paper, we consider a peer to peer database network where mappings between peers are established through data-level mappings for sharing data and resolving data heterogeneity. With regards to transaction processing in a peer to peer database network, we mainly focus on how to maintain a consistent execution view of concurrent transactions in peers without a global transaction coordinator. Since there is no global transaction coordinator and each peer executes concurrent transactions independently, different peers may produce different execution views for the same set of transactions. For this purpose, we investigate potential problems that arise when maintaining a consistent execution of concurrent transactions. In order to guarantee consistent execution, we introduce a correctness criteria and propose two approaches, namely Merged Transactions and OTM based propagation. We assume that one single peer initiates the concurrent transactions. We also present a solution for ensuring the consistent execution view of concurrent transactions considering the failures of transactions.

Market-based principles can be used to manage the risk of distributed peer-to-peer transactions. This is demonstrated by Ptrim, a system that builds a transaction default market on top of a main transaction processing system, within which peers offer to underwrite the transaction risk for a slight increase in the transaction cost. The insurance cost, determined through market-based mechanisms, is a way of identifying untrustworthy peers and perilous transactions. The risk of the transactions is contained, and at the same time members of the peer-to-peer network capitalise on their market knowledge by profiting as transaction insurers. We evaluated the approach through trials with the deployed Ptrim prototype, as well as composite experiments involving real online transaction data and real subjects participating in the transaction default market. We examine the efficacy of our approach both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective. Our findings suggest that the Ptrim market layer functions in an efficient manner, and is able to support the transaction processing system through the insurance offers it produces, thus acting as an effective means of reducing the risk of peer-to-peer transactions. In our conclusions we discuss how a system like Ptrim assimilates properties of real world markets, and its potential exposure and possible countermeasures to events such as those witnessed in the recent global financial turmoil.

A Software Transactional Memory is a concurrency control mechanism that executes multiple concurrent, optimistic, lockfree, atomic transactions, thus alleviating many problems associated with conventional mutual exclusion primitives such as monitors and locks. With the advent of massive multi-cores, more transactions can be initiated concurrently, however resulting in an increase in the percentage of conflicting transactions. Each time a transaction conflicts, it imposes a significant cost on the system, originating from the need to abort and redo all the operations, including the costly shared memory read operations, thus making the overall system significantly heavy and impractical. We present an algorithm, Clustered Checkpointing and Partial Rollback (CCPR), for reducing the conflict costs of transactions in the face of increasing conflicts. The algorithm is based on intelligent checkpointing of transactions as they proceed, and, in case of conflict, rolling them back to a safe, consistent, intermediate checkpoint, thus reducing conflict costs. The intelligence of the algorithm lies in the fact that as conflicts decrease, the checkpointing costs go low, however, when conflicts increase, the checkpointing costs increase but are still pretty much less than the amount of savings obtained by the partial rollback of the conflicting transactions. We simulated several applications in the CCPR framework and found that it can result in as good as 17% reduction in the conflict costs originating from the need to redo all the shared memory read operations.

Many existing real time commit protocols try to improve system performance by allowing a committing cohort to lend its data to an executing cohort, thus reducing data inaccessibility. They block the borrower from sending WORKDONE/PREPARED message and restrict them from lending data so that transaction abort chain is limited to one. Thus, transaction execution time increases. This paper proposes a modified real time commit protocol for distributed real time database systems (DRTDBS), Allow Commit Dependent and in Time borrowers for Incredible Value added data lending without extended abort chain (ACTIVE), where borrower cohorts are categorized as commit and abort dependent. Further, the commit dependent borrowers can lend data to executing cohorts with still limiting the transaction abort chain to one only and reducing the data inaccessibility. Also, an incoming executing cohort having borrowing factor greater than one can only borrow the dirty data items from lender. This minimizes the fruitless borrowing by the cohort. The performance of ACTIVE is compared with PROMPT, 2SC and SWIFT protocols for both main memory resident and disk resident databases with and without communication delay. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the system performance up to 4% as transaction miss percentage.

This paper presents DMVOCC-2PLV (Distributed Multiversion Optimistic Concurrency Control with Two-Phase Local Validation) protocol for processing mobile distributed real-time transactions in mobile broadcast environments. In DMVOCC-2PLV protocol, transaction validation is performed at two levels: local validation and global validation. Local validation of transactions is performed in two phases: local pre-validation and local final validation. At the MHs (Mobile Hosts), all mobile transactions perform local pre-validation of transactions by using a backward validation mechanism. The local pre-validation process is carried out against committed transactions at the server in the last broadcast cycle. Such an early data conflict detection feature can save processing and communication resources. Transactions that survive in local pre-validation must be submitted to the server for local final validation. In global validation distributed update transactions have to check to ensure distributed serializability in all participants. The protocol can eliminate conflicts between mobile read-only and mobile update transactions, and resolve data conflicts flexibly using multiversion dynamic adjustment of serialization order to avoid unnecessary restarts of transactions. Mobile read-only transactions can be committed with no-blocking, and respond time of mobile read-only transactions is greatly reduced. The tolerance of mobile transactions of disconnections from the broadcast channel is increased. The results of simulation experiment show that the new protocol proposed offers better performance in terms of miss rate, restart rate, commit rate and throughput.

Transaction processing leads to new challenges in mobile ad-hoc networks, which, in comparison to fixed-wired networks, suffer from problems like node disconnection, message loss, and frequently appearing network partitioning. As the atomic commit protocol is that part of transaction processing in which failures can lead to the most serious data blocking, we have developed a robust and failure-tolerant distributed cross-layer atomic commit protocol called CLCP that uses multiple coordinators. In order to reduce the number of both, failures and messages, our protocol makes use of acknowledgement messages for piggybacking information. We have evaluated our protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks by using several mobility models (i.e. Random Waypoint, Manhattan, and Attraction Point), and compared CLCP with other atomic commit protocols, i.e. 2PC and Paxos Commit, each implemented in 3 versions, i.e. without sending message acknowledgements, with a Relay Routing technique, and with Nearest Forward Progress Routing. Special to our simulation environment is the use of the quasi-unit-disc model, which assumes a non-binary message reception probability that captures real-world behavior much better than the classical unit-disc-model, often used in theory. Using the quasi-unit-disc model, our evaluation shows the following results. CLCP and "2PC without acknowledgement messages" have a significantly lower energy consumption than the other protocols, and CLCP is able to commit significantly more distributed transactions than all the other atomic commit protocols for each of the mobility models.

Web services can be used to automate business activities that span multiple enterprises over the Internet. Such business activities require a coordination protocol to reach consistent results among the participants in the business activity. In the current state of the art, either classical distributed transactions or extended transactions with compensating transactions are used. However, classical distributed transactions lock data in the databases of different enterprises for unacceptable durations or involve repeated retries, and compensating transactions can lead to inconsistencies in the databases of the different enterprises. In this article, we describe a novel reservation protocol that can be used to coordinate the tasks of a business activity. Instead of resorting to compensating transactions, the reservation protocol employs an explicit reservation phase and an explicit confirmation and cancellation phase. We show how our reservation protocol maps to the Web services coordination specification, and describe our implementation of the reservation protocol. We compare the performance of the reservation protocol with that of the two-phase commit protocol and optimistic two-phase commit protocol. We also compare the probability of inconsistency for the reservation protocol with that for compensating transactions.

Current hardware transactional memory systems seek to simplify parallel programming, but assume that large transactions are rare, so it is acceptable to penalize their performance or concurrency. However, future programmers may wish to use large transactions more often in order to integrate with higher-level programming models (e.g., database transactions) or perform selected I/O operations. To prevent the "small transactions are common" assumption from becoming self-fulfilling, this paper contributes TokenTM—an unbounded HTM that uses the abstraction of tokens to precisely track conflicts on an unbounded number of memory blocks. TokenTM implements tokens with new mechanisms, including metastate fission/fusion and fast token release. TokenTM executes small transactions fast, executes concurrent large transactions with no penalty to nonconflicting transactions, and gracefully handles paging, context switching, and System-V-style shared memory.

For efficiently managing Web Services (WS) transactions which are executed across multiple loosely-coupled autonomous organizations, isolation is commonly relaxed. A Web service operation of a transaction releases locks on its resources once its jobs are completed without waiting for the completions of other operations. However, those early unlocked resources can be seen by other transactions, which can spoil data integrity and cause incorrect outcomes. Existing WS transaction standards do not consider this problem. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to ensure the consistent executions of isolation-relaxing WS transactions. The mechanism effectively detects inconsistent states of transactions with a notion of an end-state dependency and recovers them to consistent states. We also propose a new Web services Transaction Dependency management Protocol (WTDP). WTDP helps organizations manage the WS transactions easily without data inconsistency. WTDP is designed to be compliant with a representative WS transaction standard, the Web Services Transactions specifications, for easy integration into existing WS transaction systems. We prototyped a WTDP-based WS transaction management system to validate our protocol.

With the advent of the new generation of Internet-based technology, in particular, web services, the automation of business activities that are distributed across multiple enterprises becomes possible. Business activities are different from traditional transactions in that they are typically asynchronous, loosely coupled, and long running. Therefore, extended transaction protocols are needed to coordinate business activities that span multiple enterprises. Existing extended transaction protocols typically rely on compensating transactions to handle exceptional conditions. In this paper, we identify a number of issues with compensation-based extended transaction protocols and describe a reservation-based extended transaction protocol that addresses those issues. Moreover, we define a set of properties, analogous to the ACID properties of traditional transactions that are more appropriate for business activities that span multiple enterprises. In addition, we compare our reservation protocol with other extended transaction protocols for coordinating business activities and present performance analyses and results.

This article constructs a theory of the location of transactions and the boundaries of firms in a productive system. It proposes that systems of production can be viewed as networks, in which tasks-cum-agents are the nodes and transfers-of material, energy and information-between tasks and agents are the links. Transactions are defined as mutually agreed-upon transfers with compensation and are located within the task network. Placing a transaction in a particular location in turn requires work to define, count (or measure), and pay for the transacted objects. The costs of this work (labeled mundane transaction costs) are generally low at the thin crossing points of the task network, which correspond to module boundaries. Therefore, transactions are more likely to be located at module boundaries than in their interiors. Several implications arise from this theory. Among these: Modularizations create new module boundaries, hence new transaction locations. Areas in the task network where transfers are dense and complex should be located in transaction-free zones , so that the cost of transacting does not overburden the system. The thin crossing points between transaction-free zones constitute breakpoints , where firms and industries may split apart. Copyright 2008 , Oxford University Press.

Next-generation applications based on Web services impose additional requirements on the use of coordination protocols with various optimizations, such as the two-phase commit protocol (2PC). This article analyses the well-known 2PC optimizations “presumed commit” and “presumed abort,” and presents an improved 2PC that is suitable for Web-service-based applications. More specifically, the protocol allows every individual service provider to choose dynamically the most appropriate presumption for any distributed transaction. This new capability is especially useful when a composite Web service is integrating component services that make different presumptions in their commit protocols. The protocol does not introduce extra overhead to the previous 2PC variants in terms of number of messages and log records, and it is easy to understand and realize. Our simulation shows that the choice of appropriate presumption has significant influence on system performance, and that in some heterogeneous settings, combining different presumptions in individual transactions outperforms adopting only one single presumption.

Transactional memory (TM) is a convenient synchronization tool that allows concurrent threads to declare sequences of instructions on shared data as speculative \emph{transactions} with "all-or-nothing" semantics. It is known that dynamic transactional memory cannot provide \emph{wait-free} progress in the sense that every transaction commits in a finite number of its own steps. In this paper, we explore the costs of providing wait-freedom to only a \emph{subset} of transactions. Since most transactional workloads are believed to be read-dominated, we require that read-only transactions commit in the wait-free manner, while updating transactions are guaranteed to commit only if they run in the absence of concurrency. We show that this kind of partial wait-freedom, combined with attractive requirements like read invisibility or disjoint-access parallelism, incurs considerable complexity costs.

The goal of this work in progress is to handle transactions of social applications by using their access classes. Basically, social users access simultaneously to a small piece of data owned by a user or a few ones. For instance, a new post of a Facebook user can create the reactions of most of his/her friends, and each of such reactions is related to the same data. Thus, grouping or chaining transactions that require the same access classes may reduce significantly the response time since several transactions are executed in one shot while ensuring consistency as well as minimizing the number of access to the persistent data storage. With this insight, we propose a middleware-based transaction scheduler that uses various strategies to chain transactions based on their access classes. The key novelties lie in (1) our distributed transaction scheduling devised on top of a ring to ensure communication when chaining transactions and (2) our ability to deal with multi-partitions transactions. The scheduling phase is based on Blockchain principle, which means in our context to record all transactions requiring the same access class into a master list in order to ensure consistency and to plan efficiently their processing. We designed and simulated our approach using SimJava and preliminary results show interesting and promising results.

In this paper, we propose the use of Versioned Boxes, which keep a history of values, as the basis for language-level memory transactions. Unlike previous work on software transactional memory, in our proposal read-only transactions never conflict with any other concurrent transaction. This may improve significantly the concurrency on applications which have longer transactions and a high read/write ratio.Furthermore, we discuss how we can reduce transaction conflicts by delaying computations and re-executing only parts of a transaction in case of a conflict. We propose two language-level abstractions to support these strategies: the per-transaction boxes and the restartable transactions.Finally, we lay out the basis for a more generic model, which better supports fine-grained restartable transactions. The goal of this new model is to generalize the previous two abstractions to reduce conflicts.

Composite web services provide promising prospects for conducting cross-organizational business transactions. Such transactions: are generally complex, require longer processing time, and manipulate financially critical data. It is therefore crucial to ensure stronger reliability, higher throughput and enhanced performance of transactions. In order to meet these requirements, this paper proposes a new commit protocol for managing transactions in composite web services. Specifically, it aims to improve the performance by reducing network delays and the processing time of transactions. The proposed protocol is based on the concept of tentative commit that allows transactions to tentatively commit on the shared data of web services. The tentative commit protocol avoids resource blocking thus improving performance. The proposed protocol is tested through various simulation experiments. The outcomes of these experiments show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in terms of transaction performance.

Although there has been a lot of discussion of "transactions" in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), very little attention has been paid for distributed transactional properties of the computations facilitating m-commerce. In this paper, we first present a requirement analysis and then present a wireless terminal-based transaction manager (TM) architecture. This architecture is based on the assumption that there is an application that supports certain business transaction(s) and that it uses the TM to store transactional state information and retrieve it after a communication link, application, or terminal crash. We present the design of such a TM, including the application interface, modules and log structure. A pilot implementation of this TM for the location-based application is also discussed. We further discuss other alternatives to design such a TM that together can be called "ontological transaction monitor". This acts as an intelligent component between the application and the servers accessed during m-commerce transactions and controls the perceivable communication behavior of the terminal towards the servers, maintains the state information and takes care of tight coupling of transactional properties of the computations as well as of security and privacy.

Although there are several factors contributing to the difficulty in meeting distributed real time transaction deadlines, data conflicts among transactions, especially in commitment phase, are the prime factor resulting in system performance degradation. Therefore, design of an efficient commit protocol is of great significance for distributed real time database systems (DRTDBS). Most of the existing commit protocols try to improve system performance by allowing a committing cohort to lend its data to an executing cohort, thus reducing data inaccessibility. These protocols block the borrower when it tries to send WORKDONE/PREPARED message [1, 6, 8, 9], thus increasing the transactions commit time. This paper first analyzes all kind of dependencies that may arise due to data access conflicts among executing-committing transactions when a committing cohort is allowed to lend its data to an executing cohort. It then proposes a static two-phase locking and high priority based, write-update type, ideal for fast and timeliness commit protocol i.e. SWIFT. In SWIFT, the execution phase of a cohort is divided into two parts, locking phase and processing phase and then, in place of WORKDONE message, WORKSTARTED message is sent just before the start of processing phase of the cohort. Further, the borrower is allowed to send WORKSTARTED message, if it is only commit dependent on other cohorts instead of being blocked as opposed to [1, 6, 8, 9]. This reduces the time needed for commit processing and is free from cascaded aborts. To ensure non-violation of ACID properties, checking of completion of processing and the removal of dependency of cohort are required before sending the YES-VOTE message. Simulation results show that SWIFT improves the system performance in comparison to earlier protocol. The performance of SWIFT is also analyzed for partial read-only optimization, which minimizes intersite message traffic, execute-commit conflicts and log writes consequently resulting in a better response time. The impact of permitting the cohorts of the same transaction to communicate with each other [5] on SWIFT has also been analyzed.

For enterprise systems to interoperate, as in an e-business transaction, some kind of transaction management is crucial. Current standard transaction protocols do not meet important requirements for e-business transactions. In this paper, a new transaction model is introduced that meets those requirements and for which well-defined business semantics can be given.

In traditional client-server databases, a transaction and its requisite data have to be colocated at a single site for the operation to proceed. This has usually been achieved by moving either the data or the transaction. However, the availability of high-bandwidth networking options has led users of today's systems to expect real-time guarantees about the completion time of their tasks. In order to offer such guarantees in a client-server database system, a transaction should be processed by any means that allows it to meet its deadline. To this end, we explore the option of moving both transactions and data to the most promising sites for successful completion. We propose a load-sharing framework that oversees the shipment of data and transactions so as to increase the efficiency of a cluster consisting of a server and a number of clients. Here, efficiency is defined as the percentage of transactions successfully completed within their deadlines by the cluster. The suitability of a client for processing a transaction is measured with respect to the availability of the transaction's required data in its local cache. In addition to the load-sharing algorithm, we use the concept of grouped locks, along with transaction deadline information, in order to schedule the movement of data objects in the cluster in a more efficient manner. We evaluate the real-time processing performance of the client-server architecture using detailed experimental testbeds. Our evaluation indicates that it is possible, in many situations, to achieve better performance than a centralized system.

The escalation of electronic attacks on databases in recent times demands fast and efficient recovery methods. The existing recovery techniques are too time-consuming as they first undo all malicious and affected transactions individually, and then redo all affected transactions, again, individually. In this paper, we propose a method that accelerates the undo and redo phases of the recovery. The method developed involves combining or fusing malicious or affected transactions occurring in groups. These fused transactions are executed during undo and redo phases instead of execution of individual transactions. By fusing relevant transactions into a single transaction, the number of operations such as start, commit, read, and write are minimized. Thus, data items which were required to be accessed multiple times in case of individual transactions are accessed only once in a fused transaction. The amount of log I/O's is reduced. This expedites the recovery procedure in the event of information attacks. A simulation analysis of the proposed model confirmed our claim.

Automated recovery of system features and their designs from program source codes is important in reverse engineering and system comprehension. It also helps in the testing of software. An error that is made by users in an input to an execution of a transaction and discovered only after the completion of the execution is called a posttransaction user-input error (PTUIE) of the transaction. For a transaction in any database application, usually, it is essential to-provide transactions for correcting the effect that could result from any PTUIE of the transaction. We discover some probable properties that exist between the control flow graph of a transaction and the control flow graphs of transactions for correcting PTUIE of the former transaction. Through recognizing these properties, we present a novel approach for the automated approximate recovery of provisions and designs for transactions to correct PTUIE of transactions in a database application. The approach recognizes these properties through analyzing the source codes of transactions in the database application statically.

International audience; Transaction support is crucial in mobile data management. Specific characteristics of mobile environments (e.g. variable bandwidth, disconnections, limited resources on mobile hosts) make traditional transaction management techniques no longer appropriate. Several models for mobile transactions have been proposed but it is difficult to have an overview of all of them. This paper analyzes and compares several contributions to mobile transactions. The analysis distinguishes two groups of models. The first group includes proposals where transactions are completely or partially executed on mobile hosts. In this group we focus on ACID properties support. The second group considers transactions requested by mobile hosts and executed on the wired network. In this case, ACID properties are not compromised and focus is on supporting mobile host movements during transaction execution. Discussions pointing out limitations, interesting solutions and research perspectives complete this paper.

In a real-time database system, an application supports a mix of transactions. These include the real-time transactions that require completion by a given deadline. Time-critical requirements also exist in many distributed multi-media system applications. Existing concurrency control procedures introduce excessive delays due to non-availability of data resources. In this study, we ignore the delays incurred by ordinary transactions, in order to achieve a non-interference mode of execution (near parallel) for the time-critical transactions. For this purpose, a data allocation model has been studied. It is a stochastic process model based on the use of two-phase locking. It highlights the available possibilities for reductions of delays for time-critical transactions within a distributed real-time database systems. Based on the new conceptual model, modified synchronization techniques for time-critical transactions have been proposed.

We have proposed speculative locking (SL) protocols to improve the performance of distributed database systems (DDBSs) by trading extra processing resources. In SL, a transaction releases the lock on the data object whenever it produces corresponding after-image during its execution. By accessing both before and after-images, the waiting transaction carries out speculative executions and retains one execution based on the termination (commit or abort) mode of the preceding transactions. By carrying out multiple executions for a transaction, SL increases parallelism without violating serializability criteria. Under the naive version of SL, the number of speculative executions of the transaction explodes with data contention. By exploiting the fact that a submitted transaction is more likely to commit than abort, we propose the SL variants that process transactions efficiently by significantly reducing the number of speculative executions. The simulation results indicate that even with manageable extra resources, these variants significantly improve the performance over two-phase locking in the DDBS environments where transactions spend longer time for processing and transaction-aborts occur frequently.

In broadcast environments, the limited bandwidth of the upstream communication channel from the mobile clients to the server bars the application of conventional concurrency control protocols. In this paper, we propose a new variant of the optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocol that is suitable for broadcast environments. At the server, forward validation of a transaction is done against currently running transactions, including mobile transactions and server transactions. At the mobile clients, partial backward validation of a transaction is done against committed transactions at the beginning of every broadcast cycle. Upon completion of execution, read-only mobile transactions can be validated and committed locally and update mobile transactions are sent to the server for final validation. These update transactions have a better chance of commitment because they have gone through the partial backward validation. In addition to the nice properties of conventional OCC protocols, this protocol provides autonomy between the mobile clients and the server with minimum upstream communication, which is a desirable feature to the scalability of applications running in broadcast environments. This protocol is able to process both update transactions and read-only transactions at the mobile clients at low space and processing overheads.

This paper introduces the Mobile Nested Transactions (MNT) model for transaction processing coordination in groups of mobile devices. The model extends traditional approaches—centralized and distributed—for distributed transaction processing over mobile devices. Under the Nested Transactions approach, sub-transactions—logical work units—processing control is highly flexible and fault-tolerant. Hence, transaction processing with mobile groups lacking of access to a wired network or the Internet becomes possible. A MNT additional advantage is that sub-transactions could be distributed among mobile devices. This is, whenever some sub-transactions are successfully committed, they cannot be affected by failed or pending sub-transactions.

In a distributed real-time database system, the only way to ensure transaction atomicity is to investigate and develop a real-time atomic commit protocol. This paper presents the model of distributed real-time transaction and analyses all kinds of dependencies because of data conflicts access. Based on this model, we propose an optimistic real-time commit protocol, double space commit (2SC), which is specifically designed for the high-performance distributed real-time transaction. 2SC allows a non-healthy transaction to lend its held data to the transactions in its commit dependency set. When the prepared transaction aborts, only the transactions in its abort dependency set are aborted while the transactions in its commit dependency set will execute as normal. The two properties of 2SC can reduce the data inaccessibility and the priority inversion that is inherent in distributed real-time commit processing. Extensive simulation experiments have been performed to compare the performance of the 2SC with that of other protocols such as the base protocol, the permits reading of modified prepared-data for timeliness [IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 11 (2) (2000) 160-181] and the deadline-driven conflict resolution [The Computer Journal 42 (8) (1999) 674-692]. The simulation results show that 2SC has the best performance. Furthermore, it is easy to incorporate in current concurrency control protocols.