A theoretical formulation for degrees of isolation in databases

✍ Scribed by Vijayalakshmi Atluri; Elisa Bertino; Sushil Jajodia

• Book ID: 103969740
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 790 KB
• Volume: 39
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0950-5849
• DOI: 10.1016/0950-5849(96)01109-3

✦ Synopsis

Although isolation is one of the desirable properties, most commercial database management systems do not provide complete isolation to transactions. They offer different degrees -0, 1, 2, or 3 -of isolation, to transactions. By providing lower degrees of isolation, response time of a database system can be improved, although at the expense of consistency. Originally different degrees of isolation were defined in terms of lock-based protocols. This paper formulates these different degrees of isolation in terms of histories, as in the case of the usual serialization theory and proposes timestamp-based protocols for different degrees of isolation.