StarBase: a firm real-time database manager for time-critical applications

Previous work in real-time database management systems (RT-DBMS) has primarily focused on simulation. This paper discusses how current real-time technology has been applied to architect an actual RT-DBMS on a real-time microlevel operating system. A real RT-DBMS must confront many practical issues which simulations typically ignore: race conditions, concurrency, and asynchrony. The challenge of constructing a RT-DBMS can be divided into three basic problems: dealing with resource contention, dealing with data contention, and enforcing timing constraints. We discuss approaches to each problem.