An Investigation into Concurrency Control Mechanisms in Data Service Layers

Service-oriented applications are conceptualised with the notion of efficiently acquiring and processing distributed data. Presently, accessing distributed data can account for up to 70 percent or more of the time spent developing such applications. Hence, one of the first things to be service-enabled in service-oriented architecture is to efficiently access and process data. To avoid hard-coding applications, we recommend the use of a data service layer (DSL) to act as a single point of access to reusable, real-time heterogeneous data. Currently, commercial integration products use two approaches, business information warehouse or virtual data federation. In this paper, we present two novel, proof-of-concept prototype DSLs that combine the two approaches using concurrency control i. e. one with Optimistic concurrency control and another with pessimistic concurrency control. Both approaches are capable of efficiently coordinating client transactions that engage multiple data sources. We also discuss the performance tests carried-out and analyse the results.