Cache Coherency Schemes for Fine-Grained Sharing in a Shared Disks Transaction Environment

Shared disks environment (SDE) refers to a distributed architecture for high performance transaction processing. In SDE, the computing nodes are locally coupled via a high-speed network and share a common database at the disk level. To avoid frequent disk accesses, each node caches database pages in its main memory buffer. However, since a particular page may be simultaneously cached in different nodes, cache consistency should be maintained to ensure that the nodes always see the most recent version of database pages. In this paper, we propose two cache coherency schemes for SDE with fine-granularity (e.g., record) locking. The proposed schemes improve the performance by alleviating the amount of message traffic or by reducing the number of cache misses. 1 Introduction Coupling multiple computing nodes for transaction processing for the sake of capacity and availability has received considerable interests. Shared disks environment (SDE) is a representative architecture of the couplin..