The network is the database

Abstract

Broadcasting fits the requirement of many modern applications for the distribution of data. This is due to the nature of data, to the ubiquity and multiplicity of devices consuming and producing data converging with the development of a global network infrastructure. Yet when the broadcasting model allows updates by the clients several issues arise, most of which are related to the control of the concurrent access and rooted in the asynchronous nature of the broadcast model. Although several concurrency control mechanisms have been proposed and studied for broadcasting, to our knowledge, no one has studied the performance of a basic locking mechanism. In this thesis we study the design and evaluate the performance of both a simple update and a transaction model controlled by a basic locking mechanism for broadcast disks architecture that involves replication on the broadcast channel and client caches.