Gemstone Systems, Inc.

Ramachandran Venkatesh

Robert F Bretl

Allen J Otis

Software and a method selectively apply a pessimistic concurrency control for each database update that conflicts with another database update. The method includes determining whether a database update conflicts with another database update, applying an optimistic concurrency control for each database update that does not conflict with another database update, and applying a pessimistic concurrency control for each database update that does conflict with another database update. This provides a selective locking concurrency control that selectively applies transaction serialization and locking only when transaction conflicts are detected. As a result, the selective locking concurrency control avoids livelock transaction failures and provides deterministic transaction completion without the computational expense of a conventional pessimistic concurrency control.

Selective pessimistic locking for a concurrently updateable database

A virtual machine computer includes multiple threads and can support multiple simultaneous workspaces. Within each workspace, multiple threads are able to access objects simultaneously. Threads are orthogonal to workspaces so that threads are not locked to particular workspaces, workspaces are not locked to particular threads, and the sizes of the workspaces are configurable to the requirements of the transactions within the workspaces. Such a virtual machine may be utilized in a variety of applications including transactional database applications in which multiple users have access to information (e.g., objects) in one or more shared databases. Such applications typically require that data transactions involving the objects in the shared database be performed reliably so as to maintain the integrity of the objects, which are sometimes called persistent objects.

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Hillsboro, OR, United States of America

Ramachandran Venkatesh