Intelligent Transaction Scheduling to Enhance Concurrency in High-Contention Workloads

Abstract

Concurrency control (CC) scheme based on transaction decomposition has significantly enhanced the concurrency performance of multicore in-memory databases, surpassing traditional CC schemes such as two-phase locking (2PL) or optimistic concurrency control (OCC), particularly in high-contention scenarios. However, this performance improvement introduces new challenges, as balancing transaction dependency constraints with enhanced concurrency optimization remains a persistent issue, especially with the increased number of concurrent client requests, which can lead to complex transaction dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamic Contention Scheduling (DCoS), a novel method that enhances transaction concurrency via a dual-granularity architecture. DCoS integrates a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based executor to schedule high-contention transactions while preserving dependency correctness. DCoS employs a one-shot execution model that enables fine-grained scheduling in high-contention scenarios, while retaining lightweight in-partition execution under low-contention conditions. The experimental results on both micro- and macro-benchmarks demonstrate that DCoS achieves a throughput up to three times higher than state-of-the-art CC protocols under high-contention workloads.

Keywords

• in-memory database
• transaction decomposition
• transaction dependency
• deep reinforcement learning
• high-contention workloads