Investigations in tree locking for compiled database applications

We report on initial experiments in tree locking schemes for compiled database applications. Such applications have a repository style of architecture in which a collection of software modules or subsystems operate on a common database in terms of a predefined set of transaction types, and are very often at the core of embedded systems. Since the tree locking protocol is deadlock free, it becomes possible to decouple recovery mechanisms from concurrency control, a property that we believe is critical to the successful deployment of database technology to this new application area. Our experiments show that the performance of tree locking can compete with two phase locking for cases such as the above in which a great deal can be known at the time of system generation about workloads.