Lecture 11: Optimistic Concurrency Control

In this lecture, we will continue our discussion of concurrency control and study another approach for isolating transactions called "Optimistic Concurrency Control." Read:

Kung, H. T., and John T. Robinson. "On Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control." ACM Transactions on Database Systems 6, no. 2 (1981): 213-226. In the Red Book.

As you read, note any terms you are unfamiliar with and come to class prepared to answer the following questions:

• When would you expect that optimistic concurrency control would outperform locking-based concurrency control?
• Can optimistic concurrency control result in deadlock?
• How would you implement optimistic concurrency control in SimpleDB?