Reservations for Conflict Avoidance in a Mobile Database System

Mobile computing characteristics demand data management systems to support independent operation. However, the execution of updates in a mobile client usually need to be considered tentative because uncoordinated updates that conflict need to be reconciled. In this paper we present a mechanism to independently guarantee that updates can be executed in the server without conflicts. To this end, clients obtain leased reservations upon the database state. Updates are specified as common small PL/SQL programs, dubbed mobile transactions, that execute both in the mobile client and in the server. Using the available reservations, the client transparently verifies that a transaction can be executed in the same way both in the mobile client and in the server, thus leading to the same final result. Mobile transactions may specify conflict detection and resolution rules to be used when transactions cannot be locally guaranteed.