ABSTRACT

Priority Mechanisms for OLTP and Transactional Web Applications

David T. McWherter, Bianca Schroeder, Anastassia Ailamaki, Mor Harchol-Balter

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Transactional workloads are a hallmark of modern OLTP and Web applications, ranging from electronic commerce and banking to online shopping. Often, the database at the core of these applications is the performance bottleneck. Given the limited resources available to the database, transaction execution times can vary wildly as they compete and wait for critical resources. As the competitor is "only a click away," valuable (high-priority) users must be ensured consistently good performance via QoS and transaction prioritization.
This paper analyzes and proposes prioritization for transactional workloads in traditional database systems (DBMS). This work first performs a detailed bottleneck analysis of resource usage by transactional workloads on commercial and noncommercial DBMS (IBM DB2, PostgreSQL, Shore) under a range of configurations. Second, this work implements and evaluates the performance of several preemptive and non-preemptive DBMS prioritization policies in PostgreSQL and Shore. The primary contributions of this work include (i) understanding the bottleneck resources in transactional DBMS workloads and (ii) a demonstration that prioritization in traditional DBMS can provide 2x-5x improvement for high-priority transactions using simple scheduling policies, without expense to low-priority transactions.

FULL PAPER: pdf

Last updated 16 February, 2004