A Causal Model for Analyzing Distributed Concurrency Control Algorithms

An event order based model for specifying and analyzing concurrency control algorithms for distributed database systems has been presented. An expanded notion of history that includes the database access events as well as synchronization events is used to study the correctness, degree of concurrency, and other aspects of the algorithms such as deadlocks and reliability. The algorithms are mapped into serializable classes that have been defined based on the order of synchronization events such as lock points, commit point, arrival of a transaction, etc,.