Reliable Scheduling of Advanced Transactions

The traditional transaction processing model is not suitable for many advanced applications, such as those having long duration or those consisting of co-operating activities. Researchers have addressed this problem by proposing various new transaction models capable of processing advanced transactions. Advanced transactions are characterized by having a number of component subtransactions whose execution is controlled by dependencies. The dependencies pose new challenges which must be addressed to ensure secure and reliable execution of advanced transactions. Violation of dependencies in advanced transactions could lead to unavailability of resources and information integrity problems. Although advanced transactions have received a lot of attention, not much work appears in addressing these issues. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scheduling advanced transactions. Specifically, we show how the different dependencies constrain the execution of the advanced transaction and give algorithms for scheduling advanced transactions that preserve the dependencies. Our scheduler is not confined to any specific advanced transaction processing model, but is capable of handling different kinds of advanced transactions, such as, Saga, Nested Transactions and Workflow.