Operations on the Physical Database - Transaction Processing - page 43

For addressing tuples in relations, System R and INGRES used tuple identifiers
consisting of a page number within a segment and a byte offset from the bottom
of a page denoting a slot that contains the byte location of the tuple in that page.
Stonebraker [ 1981 ] discusses various problems that arise in attempts to apply
standard operating system services in implementing database management systems.
Gray and Reuter [ 1993 ] give a thorough treatment of physical database organization;
they show in detail how the physical structures mentioned in this chapter are
organized and managed.
The idea of latching a page for the duration of a single action is essentially
present in System R, where it is called physical locking [Astrahan et al. 1976 ]. The
short-duration physical locks of System R allowed a page to contain uncommitted
updates by several transactions at the same time, each protected by a commit-
duration logical lock. Latches and their implementation as semaphores are discussed
by Mohan [ 1990a , 1996a ], Mohan et al. [ 1992a ], Mohan and Levine [ 1992 ], and
Gray and Reuter [ 1993 ], among others.
The way structure modifications are modeled in this topic comes from the
“nested top-level actions” of the ARIES recovery algorithm [Mohan et al. 1992a ]
and its adaptations to recoverable B-tree indexes [Mohan, 1990a , 1996a , Mohan
and Levine, 1992 ]. Other solutions follow from schemes for multi-level transaction
management [Weikum, 1991 ,Lomet, 1992 , Weikum and Vossen, 2002 ]. Sippu and
Soisalon-Soininen [ 2001 ] discuss a two-level model of search-tree transactions with
tree-structure modifications as open nested subtransactions [Traiger, 1983 ,Grayand
Reuter, 1993 ].