Awareness in Interactive Database Applications

This paper proposes a way to overcome locking problems in interactive database applications by using awareness concepts. Parallel long running editing sessions in interactive database applications often cause locking conflicts. The occurrence of conflicts can be drastically decreased by giving users means to be aware of each other and to communicate. This paper explains how this is done in database applications for the social area, which are prone to locking conflicts due to their use of relations with a very large number of attributes and long running transactions. Additionally it shows how high scalability can be achieved with the help of dynamic partitioning schemes. We present MAL, a development system for interactive database applications, which allows to develop applications that automatically include awareness-based locking in a network environment.