Effects of distributed database modeling on evaluation of transaction rollbacks

Data distribution, degree of data replication, and transaction access patterns are key factors in determining the performance of distributed database systems. In order to simplify the evaluation of performance measures, database designers and researchers tend to make simplistic assumptions about the system. Here, researchers investigate the effect of modeling assumptions on the evaluation of one such measure, the number of transaction rollbacks in a partitioned distributed database system. The researchers developed six probabilistic models and expressions for the number of rollbacks under each of these models. Essentially, the models differ in terms of the available system information. The analytical results obtained are compared to results from simulation. It was concluded that most of the probabilistic models yield overly conservative estimates of the number of rollbacks. The effect of transaction commutativity on system throughput is also grossly undermined when such models are employed.