Welcome to 2016! To kick things off for the New Year, I thought we’d dip into the newly updated Red Book. In particular, I’m going to the next few days looking at the papers from Chapter 3, “Techniques Everyone Should Know”.
From Peter Bailis’ introduction to the chapter:
In this chapter, we present primary and near-primary sources for several of the most important core concepts in database system design: query planning, concurrency control, database recovery, and distribution. The ideas in this chapter are so fundamental to modern database systems that nearly every mature database system implementation contains them.
We’ll be looking at Query Optimization, Concurrency Control, Database Recovery, and Distributed Transactions. The selected papers are:
- Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System, Selinger et al. 1979
- Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base, Gray et al. 1975 (I’ll split this one over two days).
- Concurrency Control Performance Modelling: Alternatives and Implications, Agrawal et al. 1987
- ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-Ahead Logging, Mohan et al. 1992
- Transaction Management in the R* Distributed Database Management System, Mohan et al. 1986 (Also split over two days: the base 2PC protocol, and then the Presumed Abort and Presumed Commit optimisations).
The links above will become live as the posts are published.
Enjoy!
the morning paper 
I like the new color scheme, the week’s preview and that the mailing list email has a direct link to the blog.
Thanks for continue the great work paper selection for the lazy, among others!
In case that’s of interest to you: one serious commercial application of distributed locks was (is?) the Vax/VMS DLM for Vax clusters, and it was rather extensively described in this issue of the DEC Technical Journal (pages 24-44):
Click to access dtj_v01-05_sep1987.pdf
And here’s a related paper on optimizations in the same DLM for some use cases:
Click to access P181.PDF
And BTW, thanks for your posts! They are a great source of knowledge.