Parallel-rule firing approaches have been proposed to improve the performance of production systems. However, few models have been developed to measure the performance of parallel-rule firing approaches. There are three approaches to evaluating system performance, namely, analytical modeling, simulation, and system prototyping or implementation. Analytical modeling has its advantage in being cost effective and providing a powerful tool for studying various aspects of system performance by varying system parameters. Since analytical modeling has been very successfully used in evaluating database system performance, we develop such a model for parallel production systems, where rule firing is modeled as a transaction. Both resource contention and data contention are modeled in detail and the performance of locking, timestamp and optimistic approaches is analyzed. We show that significant speedup can be gained in parallel rule execution. Our main contribution is in the insights into parallel-rule firing provided by parametric modeling.
A methodology for database system performance evaluation
