Redesign of optimistic methods: Improving performance and applicability

The original approach of optimistic concurrency control /2/ has some serious weaknesses with respect to validation, long transactions and starvation. This paper first discusses design alternatives which avoid these disadvantages. Essential improvements can be reached by a new validation scheme which is called snapshot validation. The paper then discusses a validation scheme which especially supports read transactions, so that the number of backups decreases substantially. Finally a very simple solution for the starvation problem is presented. The proposal is perfectly consistent with the underlying optimistic approach.