Review - The Notions of Consistency and Predicate Locks in a Database System.

Hector Garcia-Molina: Review - The Notions of Consistency and Predicate Locks in a Database System. ACM SIGMOD Digital Review 1: (1999)

Review

This paper highly influenced my early career. I was a graduate student at Stanford when I got a copy of the paper as an IBM Technical Report. I had just taken a graduate course on concurrent programming, and had learned that proving almost anything about concurrent programs was really hard. Yet, here was this way of looking at concurrency that was really neat and simple. I was also impressed that there was a formal model for an important database systems problem. From that point on, I took database systems more seriously, and did my thesis on concurrency control for distributed databases, basically starting from what I had read in that paper. Looking back, I see that this paper influenced many others too, who started working in the area, extending, formalizing further, and evaluating the performance of the basic ideas of that paper.

References

[1]: Kapali P. Eswaran, Jim Gray, Raymond A. Lorie, Irving L. Traiger: The Notions of Consistency and Predicate Locks in a Database System. Commun. ACM 19(11): 624-633(1976)