Real-time database systems associate the concept of deadlines with transaction executions. Previous approaches use "best effort" techniques to schedule a given set of transactions to meet the deadlines as well as to ensure the consistency of the database. However, such approaches are inadequate for target applications which have "hard" real-time deadlines that need to be met in the event of crisis situations. In such cases, it is important to obtain contingency plans that may be invoked with guaranteed execution time characteristics. This paper presents an alternative model for real-time database systems in which deadlines are associated with "contingency" constraints rather than directly with transactions. Our approach leads to a predicate-based model that intrinsically incorporates both triggering and relative timing constraints regarding the transaction executions. We exhibit that selecting contingency plans with respect to various optimality criteria has inherent computational inefficiencies. We study the issues in scheduling of the selected plans with the focus on the contention among the transactions for data resources. Our results exhibit that the data contention, by itself, has a severe adverse impact on the schedulability of the deadline-constrained transactions. We discuss some of the practical implications of our results, and we suggest some counter-measures to handle the computational complexities.
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