A Sophisticate's'introduction to Distributed Database Concurrency Control;'

Dozens of articles have been published describing "new" concurrency control algorithms for distributed database systems. All of these algorithms can be derived and understood using a few basic concepts. We show how to decompose the concurrency control problem into several subproblems, each of which has iust a few known solutions. By appropriately combining known solutions to the subproblems, we show that all published concurrency control algorithms and many new ones can be constructed. The glue that binds the subproblems and solutions together is a mathematical theory known as serializability theory. This paper does not assume previous knowledge of distributed database concurrency control algorithms, and is suitable for both the uninitiated and the cognoscente.