Transaction processing monitors

Since 1990, transaction processing in multilevel secure database management systems (DBMSs) has been receiving a great deal of attention from the database research community. Transaction processing in these systems requires modification of conventional scheduling algorithms and commit protocols. These modifications are necessary because preserving the usual transaction properties when transactions are executing at different security levels often conflicts with the enforcement of the security policy. Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of efficient, secure algorithms for the major types of secure DBMS architectures: kernelized, replicated, and distributed. An additional problem that arises uniquely in multilevel secure DBMSs is that of secure, correct execution when data at multiple security levels must be written within one transaction. Significant progress has been made in a number of these areas, and a few of the techniques have been incorporated into commercial trusted DBMS products. However, there are many open problems remain to be explored. This paper reviews the achievements to date in transaction processing for multilevel secure DBMSs. The paper provides an overview of transaction processing needs and solutions in conventional DBMSs as background, explains the constraints introduced by multilevel security, and then describes the results of research in multilevel secure transaction processing. Research results and limitations in concurrency control, multilevel transaction management, and secure commit protocols are summarized. Finally, important new areas are identified for secure transaction processing research.

Server technology started with transaction-processing systems in the sixties. Database Management Systems (DBMS) soon adopted mechanism like multi-process and multi-threading. In distributed systems, the remote procedure call also needed process structures at the server side. The same is true for file servers, object servers (CORBA), Web servers, application servers, EJB containers, and Web Services. All these systems support a request-response behavior, sometimes enhanced with a session concept. They are facing thousands of requests per second and must manage thousands of session contexts at the same time. While programming the applications that run on the servers and actually process the requests should be as simple as possible, efficiency must still be very high. So a general programming environment should be defined that is easy to use and, on the other hand, allows for the efficient execution of thousands of program instances in parallel. This contribution will identify mechanisms that have been developed in the context of transaction processing and database management. It will then generalize them to server processing of any kind. This includes program structures, context management, multi-tasking and multi-threading, process structures, program management, naming, and transactions. The driving force behind the discussion is to avoid the re-invention of the wheel that far too often occurs in computer science, mostly in ignorance of older and presumably outdated systems.

This paper presents a new approach, model theory approach, to small and medium scale transaction processing system (TPS) development. A TPS of this paper is an information system designed to process day-to-day business event data at operational level of an organization. The paper is not concerned with data base construction but with transaction processing. The model theory approach is not a software engineering approach but a systems theory approach. In the approach a model of the target system, which is called a user model, is constructed in set theory using a formal system structure of a TPS. The user model is, then, compiled into an extended Prolog (extProlog) model. The extProlog is an extension of Prolog to meet requirements for management information system development. On compilation a standardized user interface (UI) called internal UI is attached. The extProlog model with the internal UI is, then, executed under control of another standardized UI called an external UI. Implementation is an integral part of the approach. Because the UIs are designed for the formalized (abstract) structure of a TPS, they can be standardized and are provided as black box components to system development. Because a systems developer is required to only build a user model in set theory based on a model theoretic structure in the approach, it is called a model theory approach. Advantages of this approach are that it provides a theoretical structure to information systems development so that systems development can be made an engineering discipline, and facilitates rapid systems development.

Although shared memory multiprocessors are becoming increasingly popular in the commercial market place, the applications used to evaluate such systems in both academia and industry are still predominantly technical applications such as the Stanford SPLASH2 benchmarks. The difficulty in using commercial parallel shared memory applications such as transaction processing, decision support and web server applications has been in simulating the operating systems functions that are heavily used by these applications. We describe the design of an execution driven simulation tool called COMPASS (COMmercial PArallel Shared memory Simulator). We have used COMPASS at IBM to study the behavior of decision support applications and are currently studying the behavior of transaction processing applications and web servers.

Conventional sales of used shoes still face various limitations, including limited market reach, difficulty displaying product variations, and inefficient transaction and stock management processes. These issues result in low marketing effectiveness and an increased potential for errors in transaction recording. This research aims to design and develop a web-based e-commerce platform focused on online used shoe sales as a solution to these constraints. The system was developed using a waterfall model approach, encompassing the stages of needs analysis, system design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. The website was developed using the PHP programming language with the CodeIgniter 4 framework and the MySQL database management system. Testing was conducted using black-box testing to verify the suitability of the system's functionality to user needs. The implementation results showed that the system is capable of providing key features such as a used shoe catalog, product search, user account management, checkout process, and transaction reporting. Overall, the developed platform has been proven to improve sales management efficiency, expand market reach, and reduce the potential for errors in the transaction process. Thus, this system contributes to the optimization of the digitalization of micro-enterprises in the used goods trade, particularly in the shoe sales sector, through integrated and easily accessible technology solutions.

For a long time, sharing information across different systems has been one of the important issues in distributed computing and network environment. The technology aims to achieve the interoperability of large transaction processing systems, eliminate “Information Island” and share resources across different information systems. This paper presents core technologies used to build a distributed information sharing platform (DISP), with emphases on reliable and transparent data transfer, complex transaction processing and data replication across homogenous or heterogeneous database management systems (DBMS). DISP adopts ODBC standard as the client-side API(s), and any ODBC compliant client can extract data from the target server using DISP without extra coding. By adopting AntNet routing algorithm and LDAP publication technology, the metadata in DISP can be navigated and synchronized dynamically, which helps to locate target information across distributed systems. DISP has been used to connect several management information systems (MIS) in Chinese Ministry of Railways recently. The implemented results indicate that DISP promotes these systems to cooperate with each other better, thus improving the performance of executive operations significantly.

Digital commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, refers to the buying and selling of products and services via online channels. This process occurs through digital platforms and computer networks, primarily utilizing the Internet. It includes a diverse array of technologies, such as mobile commerce, electronic payment systems, supply chain logistics, web-based marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory control systems, and automated data gathering tools. Contemporary e-commerce usually incorporates the World Wide Web at some point during the transaction process. Additionally, it integrates various other technologies, including email, mobile apps, social media networks, and telecommunications tools.

Transaction-processing systems (TPS) are becoming increasingly more available as commercial products. However, the approaches to the issues associated with using TPS in multilevel secure environments are still in the research stage. In this article, we address the issues of multilevel security in distributed transaction-processing systems. A distributed transaction-processing system (DTPS) is a collection of a finite number of centralized transaction-processing systems connected by a computer network. Each of these transaction-processing systems is controlled by a software layer and can be accessed both remotely and locally. Properties of a DTPS, such as data replication, may have a substantial effect on the security of the system. The security policies and integrity constraints adopted at each site may result in global security having inconsistent states. We address the issues of achieving a multilevel secure DTPS, and discuss the security constraints and data replication.

In order to provide data consistency in the presence of failures and concurrency, database methods will continue to be important to the processing of shared information in a mobile computing environment. It is important, therefore, that we develop transaction processing systems that accommodate the limitations of mobile computing, such as frequent disconnection, limited battery life, low-bandwidth communication and reduced storage capacity, so that we can migrate existing database applications to mobile environments. In this paper, motivated by these needs, we propose a mobile transaction processing system that supports disconnected transaction processing in a mobile client-server environment. The proposed system employs compacts, which encapsulate access methods, state information and consistency constraints, to allow for local management of database transactions on mobile computers.

Processing transactions in parallel brings us a new challenge: how to study the performance behavior of parallel Transaction Processing (TP) systems with dynamic Two-Phase Locking (2PL) concurrency control method analytically. In this paper, an analytic model is proposed for shared-nothing parallel TP systems with dynamic 2PL with the no-waiting policy. In this model, a flow diagram is used for characterizing the activities of transactions, and the steady-state average values of the variables are used for analyzing this flow diagram. Using this model, the performance behavior of shared-nothing parallel TP systems is studied. Analytic results are reported. Simulation experiments are performed to validate the analysis. The predictions of this model agree well with the simulation results.

The purpose of this paper is to explore clustered transaction processing for electronic commerce (EC), where the cluster is composed of more than one arriving transaction. As transactions in EC are processed in a short time, straightforward application of conventional transaction processing to EC protocols only makes processing efficiency worse because of the overhead of the transaction processing. Motivated by this observation, we introduce the cluster into transaction processing for EC. We investigate a scheduling rule for the cluster in order to execute transactions efficiently. We also introduce the concept of urgent transaction with the highest priority to execute by overriding the urgent transaction in terms of the cluster. Finally, we report a benchmark test of our proposed clustered transaction processing to verify the efficiency of our method for electronic commerce.

Blockchains yield to new workloads in database management systems and K/V-Stores. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a technique for managing transactions in 'trustless' distributed systems. Yet, clients of nodes in blockchain networks are backed by 'trustworthy' K/V-Stores, like LevelDB or RocksDB in Ethereum, which are based on Log-Structured Merge Trees (LSM-Trees). However, LSM-Trees do not fully match the properties of blockchains and enterprise workloads.

Majority of the research in multilevel secure database management systems (MLS/DBMS) focuses primarily on centralized database systems. However, with the demand for higher performance and higher availability, database systems have moved from centralized to distributed architectures, and the research in distributed database management systems (MLS/DDBMS) is gaining more and more prominence. Concurrency control is an integral part of database systems. Secure concurrency control algorithms [15,17,18,29,] proposed in literature achieve correctness and security at the cost of declined performance of high security level transactions. These algorithms infringe the fairness in processing transactions at different security levels. Though the performance of different concurrency control algorithms have been explored extensively for centralized multilevel secure database management systems [11,31] but to the best of author’s knowledge the relative performance of transactions at different security levels using secure concurrency control algorithm for has not been reported yet. To fill this gap, this paper presents a detailed simulation model of a multilevel secure distributed database system and investigates the performance price paid for maintaining security in a MLS/DDBMS. The paper investigates the relative performance of transactions at different security levels.

This paper reports on the use of formal refinement in the development of a Transaction Processing (TP) mechanism for a secure database management system called SWORD. The SWORD specification, written in Z, defines the semantics of concurrent transactions which operate on shared databases without interfering. The specification is quite abstract: in contrast, our design for the TP mechanism (also specified in Z) is extremely complex since it achieves noninterference without using data locks. This paper describes our experience of using formal specification and refinement to develop the TP mechanism in a manner which is amenable to reasoning about its correctness.

High availability is driven by two types of factors: customer site factors such as the frequency of software and hardware upgrades, and system factors such as failure and repair rates, most often associated with mathematical models of reliability and availability. In this paper we describe several tools to assess the effects of these factors on the availability of high availability transaction processing (HATP) systems and make the expected level of performance more understandable to customers who purchase such systems, sales people who sell them, and managers who must make decisions based on the system availability. We employ a survey methodology to identify the key customer site factors that drive availability; we illustrate an accurate but greatly simplified technique for modeling system availability based on the internal system factors; and we apply statistical design of experiments and control chart methodologies to better understand the variability inherent in the system performance.