Delegation: efficiently rewriting history

Abstract

Transaction delegation, as introduced in ACTA, allows a transaction to transfer responsibility for the operations that it has performed on an object to another transaction. Delegation can be used to broaden the visibility of the delegatee, and to tailor the recovery properties of a transaction model. Delegation has been shown to be useful in synthesizing advanced transaction models. With an efficient implementation of delegation it becomes practicable to realize various advanced transaction models whose requirements are specified at a high level language instead of the current expensive practice of building them from scratch. The authors identify the issues in efficiently supporting delegation and hence advanced transaction models, and illustrate this with our solution in ARIES, an industrial-quality system that uses UNDO/REDO recovery. Since delegation is tantamount to rewriting history, a naive implementation can entail frequent, costly log accesses, and can result in complicated recovery protocols. The algorithm achieves the effect of rewriting history without rewriting the log, resulting in an implementation that realizes the semantics of delegation at minimal additional overhead and incurs no overhead when delegation is not used. The work indicates that it is feasible to build efficient and robust, general-purpose machinery for advanced transaction models. It is also a step towards making recovery a first-class concept within advanced transaction models.