This book contains a number of chapters on transactional database concurrency control. This volume's entire sequence of chapters can summarized as follows: A two-sentence summary of the volume's entire sequence of chapters is this: traditional locking techniques can be improved in multiple dimensions, notably in lock scopes (sizes), lock modes (increment, decrement, and more), lock durations (late acquisition, early release), and lock acquisition sequence (to avoid deadlocks). Even if some of these improvements can be transferred to optimistic concurrency control, notably a fine granularity of concurrency control with serializable transaction isolation including phantom protection, pessimistic concurrency control is categorically superior to optimistic concurrency control, i.e., independent of application, workload, deployment, hardware, and software implementation.

Goetz Graefe has been a professor, product architect, and industrial researcher since 1987. Like other database vendors, Microsoft SQL Server adopted his designs for query optimization and query execution. He has published tutorial surveys on query execution, sorting, b-tree indexing, concurrency control, logging and recovery, as well as numerous novel techniques and research results in query processing and transactional data storage.