Deadlock Contention Signatures in Oracle Database Multi-Tenant Architecture

Abstract

Deadlock formation in Oracle multitenant environments arises from the interplay between transactional
workload timing, shared resource layers, and workflow execution patterns across pluggable databases.
This study characterizes deadlock events not as isolated failures but as recurring contention signatures,
which emerge when lock acquisition windows overlap under burst-driven concurrency. Intra-tenant
deadlocks primarily originate from overlapping DML operations with deferred commits, while cross
tenant deadlocks are triggered by contention in library cache synchronization and data dictionary
metadata access. By analyzing event traces, lock dependency graphs, and temporal clustering patterns,
the study demonstrates that effective mitigation requires architectural and workflow-level adjustments
rather than SQL micro-optimization alone. Recognizing deadlock signatures enables proactive detection,
improved transaction sequencing, and more stable throughput in high-demand multi-tenant deployments.