DEADLOCK-FREEDOM (AND SAFETY) OF TRANSACTIONS IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE (Extended Abstract)

Summary: Shows deadlock-freedom checking for lock-based transactions in distributed DBs is coNP-complete even for two transactions, contrasting polynomial centralized case. Gives poly-time algorithms when number of sites is fixed, and for safety/deadlock with fixed #transactions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 724
Venue: PODS
Year: 1985
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 13,210 | 9.37%
DOI: 10.1145/325405.325418

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Ouri Wolfson (AT&T; Technion)
2. Mihalis Yannakakis (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{wolfson_pods85,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '85},
        title = {{DEADLOCK-FREEDOM (AND SAFETY) OF TRANSACTIONS IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE (Extended Abstract)}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/325405.325418},
        doi = {10.1145/325405.325418},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Wolfson, Ouri and Yannakakis, Mihalis},
        year = {1985}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,777	Is Distributed Locking Harder?	1982	PODS	6.5134169e-05
6,992	Consistency, Concurrency, And Crash Recovery	1978	SIGMOD	5.7303405e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,309	Reliable Transaction Management in a Multidatabase System	1990	SIGMOD
2	9,911	An Optimal Algorithm For Testing For Safety And Detecting Deadlocks In Locked Transaction Systems	1982	PODS
3	4,397	Deadlock Removal Using Partial Rollback in Database Systems	1981	SIGMOD
4	2,299	A Locking Protocol For Resource Coordination In Distributed Databases	1978	SIGMOD
5	7,253	Compatibility And Commutativity In Non-Two-Phase Locking Protocols	1982	PODS
6	14,438	Deadlock Resolution and Semantic Lock Models in Object-Oriented Distributed Systems	1988	SIGMOD
7	14,477	Maximal Concurrency By Locking	1984	PODS
8	14,450	Safety Of Non-Well-Locked Transaction Systems	1986	PODS
9	14,502	A Framework for Understanding Distributed (Deadlock Detection) Algorithms	1983	PODS
10	4,777	Is Distributed Locking Harder?	1982	PODS