Multithreading gets RDBMS touch from Sun

Filed in archive Programming on August 15, 2007

Sun's multithreading support will be extended for protection of applications and data from entering each others domain and in the process preventing corruption of memory or data but this is not something new as relational database vendors have encountered similar issues three decades back. In the case of multithreading all takes place in the memory of the server and one cannot avoid two applications from occupying the same memory space or accessing the same data.

Mark Moir, Senior staff engineer, Sun Labs. Said on this issue:

We have a joke that there isn't an idea we haven't ripped off from the RDBMS world for the multithreaded world.

As of now thread locking is implemented where the piece of memory is locked by one thread so that the other cannot access it but this slows down the overall servers in the process. Transactional memory aims to automate this process and stop any kind of overlapping. In case of Sun it has opted for a hybrid path using a combination of hardware and software fixes and there would be support for transactional memory in Sun's yet to be launched rock processor and Solaris. The good thing about transactional memory is that it helps in undertaking concurrent programs and there is no Hardware Support required.