Towards a visually interpretable analysis of Two-Phase Locking membership

TL;DR

This paper presents a tool for visually analyzing Two-Phase Locking (2PL) schedules, aiming to make the policy's complex schedule analysis more interpretable through graphical and tabular representations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to automatically generate visual and tabular analyses of 2PL schedules, enhancing interpretability and understanding of the locking protocol.

Findings

Developed a prototype tool for 2PL schedule analysis

Demonstrated improved interpretability of 2PL schedules

Facilitated understanding of 2PL properties through visualization

Abstract

Two-phase locking (2PL) is a consolidated policy commonly adopted by Database Management Systems to enforce serializability of a schedule. While the policy is well understood, both in its standard and in the strict version, automatically deriving a suitable tabular/graphical analysis of schedules with respect to 2PL is far from trivial, and requires several technicalities that do not straightforwardly translate to visual cues. In this paper, we delve into the details of the development of a tool for 2PL analysis.