Paper Review: Transaction Management in the R Distributed Database Management System

Title and Author of Paper Transaction Management in the R Distributed Database Management System. C. Mohan et al. Summary This paper describes to handle transactions in a distributed environment using a two-phase commit protocol (2PC). 2PC is a form of atomic commit that uses a coordinator to decide whether or not to commit or abort a transaction. The paper goes on to compare standard 2PC with two variations (1) presumed abort (PA) and (2) presumed commit (PC), which differ in how they handle failure conditions....

May 6, 2016 · 6 min · Kevin Sookocheff

Paper Review: Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System

Title and Author of Paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System. P. G. Selinger et al. Summary This paper describes methods of the SQL query optimizer for determining the cost of satisfying a query. It also describes methods for choosing among several competing methods. What are the motivations for this work? SQL is a high-level language where requests for data are stated non-procedurally. The user is not expected to need any knowledge of how the data is stored in the database or how it is retrieved....

March 15, 2016 · 3 min · Kevin Sookocheff

Paper Review: System R: Relational Approach to Database Management

Title and Author of Paper System R: Relational Approach to Database Management. M. M. Astrahan et al. Summary It’s hard to overstate the influence that the System R project had on database design and implementation. After reading this paper it is clear that traditional database architecture has not significantly changed since the System R project. System R provided the first implementation of SQL, the first demonstration of performant transactions, and provided the foundational groundwork in concurrency control and query optimization....

March 2, 2016 · 4 min · Kevin Sookocheff