1. Michael J. Franklin: Concurrency Control and Recovery. The Handbook of Computer Science and Engineering, A. Tucker, ed., CRC Press, Boca Raton, 1997.
This paper is a very accessible overview of transactions. We will go over this paper in lectures 5 and 6.
In lecture 5, we will focus on concurrency control. For this lecture, please read Sections 1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, and 3.2. While reading these sections, focus on the following questions
What is a transaction and what are the ACID properties?
What is serializability? What is a serializable schedule?
How does two-phase locking (2PL) work?
What is the “phantom problem”
What are the four levels of isolation and what are the differences between them?
What are some benefits and drawbacks of providing the notion of a transaction in a DBMS? The details of failure recovery can get quite confusing. Every time you get confused, write down your question and bring it to class. We will walk through the principles of failure recovery and the details of the ARIES method.