SerializabilityIn concurrency control of databases, transaction processing (transaction management), and various transactional applications (e.g., transactional memory and software transactional memory), both centralized and distributed, a transaction schedule is serializable if its outcome (e.g., the resulting database state) is equal to the outcome of its transactions executed serially, i.e. without overlapping in time. Transactions are normally executed concurrently (they overlap), since this is the most efficient way.
LinearizabilityIn concurrent programming, an operation (or set of operations) is linearizable if it consists of an ordered list of invocation and response events, that may be extended by adding response events such that: The extended list can be re-expressed as a sequential history (is serializable). That sequential history is a subset of the original unextended list. Informally, this means that the unmodified list of events is linearizable if and only if its invocations were serializable, but some of the responses of the serial schedule have yet to return.
Lock (computer science)In computer science, a lock or mutex (from mutual exclusion) is a synchronization primitive: a mechanism that enforces limits on access to a resource when there are many threads of execution. A lock is designed to enforce a mutual exclusion concurrency control policy, and with a variety of possible methods there exists multiple unique implementations for different applications. Generally, locks are advisory locks, where each thread cooperates by acquiring the lock before accessing the corresponding data.
