On using priority inheritance in real-time databases

The authors investigate solutions to the priority inversion problem in a real-time database where two-phase locking is employed for concurrency control. They examine two basic schemes for addressing the priority inversion problem, one based on priority inheritance and the other based on priority abort. The authors also study a new scheme, called conditional priority inheritance, which attempts to capitalize on the advantage of each of the two basic schemes. The performance studies, conducted on a real-time database testbed, indicated that the basic priority inheritance protocol is inappropriate for solving the priority inversion problem in real-time database systems. The authors also show that the conditional priority inheritance scheme and the priority abort scheme perform well for a wide range of system workloads