Is a bird in the hand worth more than two in the bush? Limitations of priority cognizance in conflict resolution for firm real-time database systems

On the premise that successful incorporation of priority cognizance may lead to an increase in the performance of optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocols in firm real time database systems (RTDBS), the issue of priority cognizance is analyzed and a critical condition that must hold for priority cognizant conflict to work is identified. The condition is that, on the average, the conflict sets of validating transactions should have a large number of transactions. This is called `a bird in hand more than two in the bush' phenomenon.