The Performance of Alternative Strategies for Dealing with Deadlocks in Database-Management Systems

There is growing evidence that, for a fairly wide variety of database workloads and system configurations, locking is the con-currency control strategy of choice. With locking, of course, comes the possibility of deadlocks. Although the database literature is full of algorithms for dealing with deadlocks, very little in the way of practical performance information is available to a database system designer faced with the decision of choosing a good deadlock resolution strategy. This paper is and attempt to bridge this gap in our understanding of the behavior and performance of alternative deadlock resolution stratgies.