Detection for Conflicts of Dependencies in Advanced Transaction Models

Transactional dependencies play an important role in coordinating the execution of subtransactions in advanced transaction models, such as, nested transactions and workflow transactions. The correct execution of the advanced transactions depends on ensuring the satisfaction of all the dependencies, which are specified by the application developer. Incorrect specification of transaction dependencies might lead to information integrity problems and unavailability of resources. An example of incorrect specification of dependencies is the presence of conflicts – the satisfaction of constraints imposed by one dependency may violate the constraints imposed by another dependency. Algorithms that can analyze and detect dependency conflicts are necessary. Although a lot of research appears on advanced transactions, no previous work has been done on analysis of dependency conflicts. In this work we analyze different kinds of dependency conflicts, propose algorithms to detect and remove the conflicts of dependencies in advanced transaction specifications. This will enable the application developer to get assurance about the correctness of the dependency specification and the correct behavior of the underlying advanced transaction model.