In this paper, we have proposed speculative locking (SL) protocols to improve the performance of distributed database systems (DDBSs) by trading extra processing resources. In SL, a transaction releases the lock on the data object whenever it produces corresponding after-image during its execution. By accessing both before and after-images, the waiting transaction carries out speculative executions and retains one execution based on the termination (commit or abort) mode of the preceding

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... tions. By carrying out multiple executions for a transaction, SL increases parallelism without violating serializability criteria. Under the naive version of SL, the number of speculative executions of the transaction explodes with data contention. By exploiting the fact that a submitted transaction is more likely to commit than abort, we propose the SL variants that process transactions efficiently by significantly reducing the number of speculative executions. The simulation results indicate that even with manageable extra resources, these variants significantly improve the performance over two-phase locking in the DDBS environments where transactions spend longer time for processing and transaction-aborts occur frequently.