A Lower Bound on the Probability of Conflict Under Nonuniform Access
                        in Database Systems


   K. Humenik, P. Matthews, A.B. Stephens and Y. Yesha




     Past performance analyses of resource sharing systems often assumed 
uniform resource access distributions. This assumption is made for reasons
of computational tractability. In some of these analyses it has been
conjectured tht such an assumption is optimistic, in the sense that it
minimizes the probability of resource conflict. In this paper we give
conditions on access distributions for which the above conjecture is true
and show that these conditions are satisfied for two natural probabilistic
models. Our technique can be applied to other resource contention problems.