DIBS: Database Isolation By Scheduling

(Kevin Gaffney, Univ. Wisconsin-Madison, is presenting on Wed. 2/5/20 at 11:00AM & 7:00PM ET)

Preventing concurrent transactions from interfering with each other is a performance challenge in modern relational database systems. The majority of transaction isolation systems achieve isolation through either mid-execution or post-execution validation. As a result, transaction managers are often complex and require developing entire systems around them. We show that database isolation can be guaranteed by analyzing and scheduling declarative transactions outside of the database using pre-execution validation. We provide an implementation that does so with no knowledge of the database system’s implementation or state, achieving competitive performance on transaction processing benchmarks.