Design Issues of an Efficient Distributed Database Scheduler for Telecom

Peter van der Stok

Appeared in: 7th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (IC3N'98), pp 897-904 (1998).

ABSTRACT

We optimize the speed of real-time databases by optimizing the scheduler. The performance of a database is directly linked to the environment it operates in, and we use environment characteristics as guidelines for the optimization. A typical Telecom environment is investigated, and characteristics that are relevant to performance are derived. A theoretical study of database scheduler performance is combined with the characteristics of the Telecom environment. Design issues are extracted from this combination. It turns out that scheduler overhead, rather than concurrency is the most important factor of database performance. With the derived issues in mind, a light-weight Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC-light) scheduler has been designed. OCC-light is implemented in the Mnesia database. Experiments were conducted to compare OCC-light against the existing Two Phase Locking (2PL) scheduler. OCC-light compared favorably to 2PL, as was already suggested by our theoretical study.

Postscript