Previous Projects

Principal Investigator: P.K. Chrysanthis

The ability of transactions to mask the effects of concurrency and failures makes them appropriate building blocks for emerging advanced applications such as design environments and distributed operating systems. Several extensions have been proposed to the transaction model adopted in traditional database systems in order to support the functional and performance requirements of these complex systems. The goal of this project is to enhance the understanding of transaction processing in these complex systems. Towards this end, we have designed a formal transaction framework, called ACTA, for specifying the properties of extended transactions as well as for reasoning about them. ACTA captures the existing transaction definitions within a unifying framework, thereby facilitating comparisons and supporting integration. ACTA has been used to develop new transaction definitions and transaction models in a systematic way. It can also be used to construct the necessary transaction and object management support.

Some Relevant Publications:

• P. K. Chrysanthis and K. Ramamritham. "Synthesis of Extended Transaction Models Using ACTA.'' ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 19(3):450-491, September 1994.
• P. K. Chrysanthis and K. Ramamritham. "A Formalism for Extended Transaction Models," Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on VLDB, pp. 103-111, September 1991.
• P. K. Chrysanthis and K. Ramamritham. "A Unifying Framework for Transactions in Competitive and Cooperative Environments,'' IEEE Office and Knowledge Engineering, 4(1):3-22, February 1991.
• P. K. Chrysanthis and K. Ramamritham. "ACTA: A Framework for Specifying and Reasoning about Transaction Structure and Behavior," Proceedings of the 1990 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 194-203, May 1990.
  (Also, included in Readings in Database Systems, Second Edition, M. Stonebraker Editor, Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.)