While shared-nothing parallel infrastructures provide fast processing of explosively growing digital content, managing data efficiently across multiple nodes is important. The value-range partitioning method with parallel B-tree structures in a shared-nothing environment is an efficient approach for handling large amounts of data. To handle large amounts of data, it is also important to provide an efficient concurrency control protocol for the parallel B-tree. Many studies have proposed concurrency control protocols for Btrees, which use latch-coupling. None of these studies has considered that latch-coupling contains a performance bottleneck of sending of messages between processing elements (PEs) in distributed environments because latch-coupling is efficient for a B-tree on a single machine. The only protocol without latch-coupling is the B-link algorithm, but it is difficult to use the B-link algorithm directly on an entire parallel B-tree structure because it is necessary to guarantee the consistency of the side pointers. We propose a new concurrency control protocol named LCFB that requires no latch-coupling in optimistic processes. LCFB reduces the amount of communication between PEs during a B-tree traversal. To detect access path errors in the LCFB protocol caused by removal of latch-coupling, we assign boundary values to each index page. Because a page split may cause page deletion in a Fat-Btree, we also propose an effective method for handling page deletions without latch-coupling. We then combine LCFB with the B-link algorithm within each PE to reduce the cost of Structure Modification Operations (SMOs) in a PE, as a solution to the difficulty of * This work was done while the author was with Tokyo Institute of Technology. The author is now working at Systems Development Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd.
† The author is a JSPS Research Fellow (DC).Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EDBT'08, March 25-30, 2008, Nantes, France. Copyright 2008 consistency management for the side pointers in a parallel B-tree structure. To compare the performance of the proposed protocol with conventional protocols MARK-OPT, INC-OPT, and ARIES/IM, we implemented them on an autonomous disk system with a Fat-Btree structure. Experimental results in various environments indicate that the system throughput of the proposed protocols is always superior to those of the other protocols, especially in large-scale configurations, and LCFB with the B-link algorithm is effective at higher update ratios.