Discriminative Admission Control for Shared-everything Database under Mixed OLTP Workloads

Due to the variability of IT applications, the back-end databases usually run the mixed OLTP workload, which comprises a variety of transactions. Some of these transactions are high-conflict and others are low-conflict. Furthermore, high-conflict transactions may contend on different groups of data stored in the database. Without precise admission control, too many transactions with conflict on the same group of records are simultaneously executed by the OLTP engine, and this will lead to the well-known problem of data-contention thrashing. Under mixed OLTP workloads, conflicting transactions would be blocked for a long time or rolled back finally, and other transactions have not enough opportunity to be processed.To achieve the optimal performance for each kind of transaction, we design a discriminative admission control mechanism for shared-everything database, referred to as DAC. DAC can quickly identify and classify high-conflict transactions according to the set of records they try to access, which is defined as a conflict zone. DAC makes admission control over OLTP transactions with the conflict zone as the granularity. By adaptively adjusting the transaction concurrency level for each zone, transaction blocking and waiting among the same kind of high-conflict transactions can be alleviated. Furthermore, thread resources are released to make the execution of low-conflict transactions less affected. We evaluate DAC using a main-memory database prototype and a classical disk-based database system. Experimental results demonstrate that DAC can help OLTP engine significantly improve the performance under mixed OLTP workloads.