Lock-Based Protocols

■  A lock is a mechanism to control concurrent access to a data item

■  Data items can be locked in two modes :
1. exclusive (X) mode. Data item can be both read as well as
written. X-lock is requested using lock-X instruction.
2. shared (S) mode. Data item can only be read. S-lock is
requested using lock-S instruction.
■  Lock requests are made to concurrency-control manager.
Transaction can proceed only after request is granted.

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 Lock-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  Lock-compatibility matrix

■  A transaction may be granted a lock on an item if the requested

lock is compatible with locks already held on the item by other
transactions
■  Any number of transactions can hold shared locks on an item,
but if any transaction holds an exclusive on the item no other
transaction may hold any lock on the item.
■  If a lock cannot be granted, the requesting transaction is made to
wait till all incompatible locks held by other transactions have
been released. The lock is then granted.

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 Lock-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  Example of a transaction performing locking:

T2: lock-S(A);
read (A);
unlock(A);
lock-S(B);
read (B);
unlock(B);
display(A+B)
■  Locking as above is not sufficient to guarantee serializability — if A and B
get updated in-between the read of A and B, the displayed sum would be
wrong.
■  A locking protocol is a set of rules followed by all transactions while
requesting and releasing locks. Locking protocols restrict the set of
possible schedules.

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 Pitfalls of Lock-Based Protocols
■  Consider the partial schedule

■  Neither T3 nor T4 can make progress — executing lock-S(B) causes T4

to wait for T3 to release its lock on B, while executing lock-X(A) causes
T3 to wait for T4 to release its lock on A.
■  Such a situation is called a deadlock.
★  To handle a deadlock one of T3 or T4 must be rolled back 

and its locks released.

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 Pitfalls of Lock-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  The potential for deadlock exists in most locking protocols.

Deadlocks are a necessary evil.
■  Starvation is also possible if concurrency control manager is
badly designed. For example:
★  A transaction may be waiting for an X-lock on an item, while a
sequence of other transactions request and are granted an S-lock
on the same item.
★  The same transaction is repeatedly rolled back due to deadlocks.
■  Concurrency control manager can be designed to prevent
starvation.

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 The Two-Phase Locking Protocol

■  This is a protocol which ensures conflict-serializable schedules.

■  Phase 1: Growing Phase
★  transaction may obtain locks
★  transaction may not release locks
■  Phase 2: Shrinking Phase
★  transaction may release locks
★  transaction may not obtain locks
■  The protocol assures serializability. It can be proved that the
transactions can be serialized in the order of their lock points
(i.e. the point where a transaction acquired its final lock).

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 The Two-Phase Locking Protocol (Cont.)

■  Two-phase locking does not ensure freedom from deadlocks

■  Cascading roll-back is possible under two-phase locking. To
avoid this, follow a modified protocol called strict two-phase
locking. Here a transaction must hold all its exclusive locks till it
commits/aborts.
■  Rigorous two-phase locking is even stricter: here all locks are
held till commit/abort. In this protocol transactions can be
serialized in the order in which they commit.

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 The Two-Phase Locking Protocol (Cont.)

■  There can be conflict serializable schedules that cannot be

obtained if two-phase locking is used.
■  However, in the absence of extra information (e.g., ordering of
access to data), two-phase locking is needed for conflict
serializability in the following sense:
Given a transaction Ti that does not follow two-phase locking, we
can find a transaction Tj that uses two-phase locking, and a
schedule for Ti and Tj that is not conflict serializable.

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 Lock Conversions

■  Two-phase locking with lock conversions:

– First Phase:
★  can acquire a lock-S on item
★  can acquire a lock-X on item
★  can convert a lock-S to a lock-X (upgrade)

– Second Phase:
★  can release a lock-S
★  can release a lock-X
★  can convert a lock-X to a lock-S (downgrade)
■  This protocol assures serializability. But still relies on the
programmer to insert the various locking instructions.

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 Automatic Acquisition of Locks

■  A transaction Ti issues the standard read/write instruction,

without explicit locking calls.
■  The operation read(D) is processed as:
if Ti has a lock on D
then
read(D)
else
begin
if necessary wait until no other
transaction has a lock-X on D
grant Ti a lock-S on D;
read(D)
end
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 Automatic Acquisition of Locks (Cont.)

■  write(D) is processed as:

if Ti has a lock-X on D
then
write(D)
else
begin
if necessary wait until no other trans. has any lock on D,
if Ti has a lock-S on D
then
upgrade lock on D to lock-X
else
grant Ti a lock-X on D
write(D)
end;
■  All locks are released after commit or abort

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 Implementation of Locking

■  A Lock manager can be implemented as a separate process to

which transactions send lock and unlock requests
■  The lock manager replies to a lock request by sending a lock
grant messages (or a message asking the transaction to roll
back, in case of a deadlock)
■  The requesting transaction waits until its request is answered
■  The lock manager maintains a datastructure called a lock table
to record granted locks and pending requests
■  The lock table is usually implemented as an in-memory hash
table indexed on the name of the data item being locked

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Lock Table
■  Black rectangles indicate granted
locks, white ones indicate waiting
requests
■  Lock table also records the type of
lock granted or requested
■  New request is added to the end of
the queue of requests for the data
item, and granted if it is compatible
with all earlier locks
■  Unlock requests result in the
request being deleted, and later
requests are checked to see if they
can now be granted
■  If transaction aborts, all waiting or
granted requests of the transaction
are deleted
★  lock manager may keep a list of
locks held by each transaction, to
implement this efficiently

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 Graph-Based Protocols

■  Graph-based protocols are an alternative to two-phase locking

■  Impose a partial ordering → on the set D = {d1, d2 ,..., dh} of all
data items.
★  If di → dj then any transaction accessing both di and dj must access
di before accessing dj.
★  Implies that the set D may now be viewed as a directed acyclic
graph, called a database graph.
■  The tree-protocol is a simple kind of graph protocol.

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 Tree Protocol

■  Only exclusive locks are allowed.

■  The first lock by Ti may be on any data item. Subsequently, a
data Q can be locked by Ti only if the parent of Q is currently
locked by Ti.
■  Data items may be unlocked at any time.

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 Graph-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  The tree protocol ensures conflict serializability as well as

freedom from deadlock.
■  Unlocking may occur earlier in the tree-locking protocol than in
the two-phase locking protocol.
★  shorter waiting times, and increase in concurrency
★  protocol is deadlock-free, no rollbacks are required
★  the abort of a transaction can still lead to cascading rollbacks.
(this correction has to be made in the book also.)
■  However, in the tree-locking protocol, a transaction may have to
lock data items that it does not access.
★  increased locking overhead, and additional waiting time
★  potential decrease in concurrency
■  Schedules not possible under two-phase locking are possible
under tree protocol, and vice versa.

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 Timestamp-Based Protocols

■  Each transaction is issued a timestamp when it enters the system. If

an old transaction Ti has time-stamp TS(Ti), a new transaction Tj is
assigned time-stamp TS(Tj) such that TS(Ti) <TS(Tj).
■  The protocol manages concurrent execution such that the time-
stamps determine the serializability order.
■  In order to assure such behavior, the protocol maintains for each data
Q two timestamp values:
★  W-timestamp(Q) is the largest time-stamp of any transaction that
executed write(Q) successfully.
★  R-timestamp(Q) is the largest time-stamp of any transaction that
executed read(Q) successfully.

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 Timestamp-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  The timestamp ordering protocol ensures that any conflicting

read and write operations are executed in timestamp order.
■  Suppose a transaction Ti issues a read(Q)
1. If TS(Ti) ≤ W-timestamp(Q), then Ti needs to read a value of Q
that was already overwritten. Hence, the read operation is
rejected, and Ti is rolled back.
2. If TS(Ti)≥ W-timestamp(Q), then the read operation is
executed, and R-timestamp(Q) is set to the maximum of R-
timestamp(Q) and TS(Ti).

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 Timestamp-Based Protocols (Cont.)

■  Suppose that transaction Ti issues write(Q).

■  If TS(Ti) < R-timestamp(Q), then the value of Q that Ti is
producing was needed previously, and the system assumed that
that value would never be produced. Hence, the write operation
is rejected, and Ti is rolled back.
■  If TS(Ti) < W-timestamp(Q), then Ti is attempting to write an
obsolete value of Q. Hence, this write operation is rejected, and
Ti is rolled back.
■  Otherwise, the write operation is executed, and W-
timestamp(Q) is set to TS(Ti).

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 Example Use of the Protocol

A partial schedule for several data items for transactions with

timestamps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

T1 T2 T3 T4 T5
read(X)
read(Y)
read(Y)
write(Y)
write(Z)
read(Z)
read(X)
abort
read(X)
write(Z)
abort
write(Y)
write(Z)

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 Correctness of Timestamp-Ordering Protocol
■  The timestamp-ordering protocol guarantees serializability since
all the arcs in the precedence graph are of the form:

transaction transaction
with smaller with larger
timestamp timestamp

Thus, there will be no cycles in the precedence graph

■  Timestamp protocol ensures freedom from deadlock as no
transaction ever waits.
■  But the schedule may not be cascade-free, and may not even be
recoverable.

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