Active databases and real-time databases have been important areas of research in the recent past. It has been recognized that many benefits can be gained by integrating real-time and active database technologies. However, not much work has been done in the area of transaction processing in real-time active databases. This paper deals with an important aspect of transaction processing in real-time active databases, namely the problem of assigning priorities to transactions. In these systems, time-constrained transactions trigger other transactions during their execution. We present three policies for assigning priorities to parent, immediate and deferred transactions executing on a multiprocessor system and then evaluate the policies through simulation. The policies use different amounts of semantic information about transactions to assign the priorities. The simulator has been validated against the results of earlier published studies. We conducted experiments in three settings: a task setting, a main memory database setting and a disk-resident database setting. Our results demonstrate that dynamically changing the priorities of transactions, depending on their behavior (triggering rules), yields a substantial improvement in the number of triggering transactions that meet their deadline in all three settings.
