Table of Contents
DB offers a great deal of support for multi-threaded and multi-process applications even when transactions are not in use. Many of DB's handles are thread-safe, or can be made thread-safe by providing the appropriate flag at handle creation time, and DB provides a flexible locking subsystem for managing databases in a concurrent application. Further, DB provides a robust mechanism for detecting and responding to deadlocks. All of these concepts are explored in this chapter.
Before continuing, it is useful to define a few terms that will appear throughout this chapter:
Thread of control
Refers to a thread that is performing work in your application. Typically, in this book that thread will be performing DB operations.
Note that this term can also be taken to mean a separate process that is performing work — DB supports multi-process operations on your databases.
Locking
When a thread of control obtains access to a shared resource, it is said to be locking that resource. Note that DB supports both exclusive and non-exclusive locks. See Locks for more information.
Free-threaded
Data structures and objects are free-threaded if they can be shared across threads of control without any explicit locking on the part of the application. Some books, libraries, and programming languages may use the term thread-safe for data structures or objects that have this characteristic. The two terms mean the same thing.
For a description of free-threaded DB objects, see Which DB Handles are Free-Threaded.
Blocked
When a thread cannot obtain a lock because some other thread already holds a lock on that object, the lock attempt is said to be blocked. See Blocks for more information.
Deadlock
Occurs when two or more threads of control attempt to access conflicting resource in such a way as none of the threads can any longer may further progress.
For example, if Thread A is blocked waiting for a resource held by Thread B, while at the same time Thread B is blocked waiting for a resource held by Thread A, then neither thread can make any forward progress. In this situation, Thread A and Thread B are said to be deadlocked.
For more information, see Deadlocks.
The following describes to what extent and under what conditions individual handles are free-threaded.
Environment
Free-threaded so long as EnvironmentConfig.setThreaded() is set to true.
Database
Free-threaded so long as the database is opened in a free-threaded environment.
SecondaryDatabase
Same conditions apply as for Database handles.
Cursor
Cursors are not free-threaded. However, they can be used by multiple threads of control so long as the application serializes access to the handle.
SecondaryCursor
Same conditions apply as for Cursor handles.
Transaction
Access must be serialized by the application across threads of control.
All classes found in the DPL (com.sleepycat.persist.*) are free-threaded.
All classes found in the bind APIs (com.sleepycat.bind.*) are free-threaded.