Abstract. Deadlock detection is an interesting problem in multidatabase systems (MDBS), since the autonomy of the local systems precludes the visibility of the state of local transactions and the contention on items, and therefore the classical approaches proposed for homogeneous distributed database systems cannot be extended to the MDBS case. A few specific methods have been proposed in the literature to detect potential global deadlocks, that do not necessarily correspond to real ones. In this paper we present a comparative performance study of several global deadlock detection methods. The results of the analysis have suggested a new hybrid deadlock detection method, that we present in the paper and that is very well suited for a distributed implementation and has a performance that, according to our experiments, compares favourably with all the other methods in a variety of workload conditions.

Print publication: Issue 4 (December 1997)
Received 11 September 1995