Database Sharing (DB-sharing) refers to a general approach for building a distributed high performance transaction system. The nodes of a DB-sharing system are locally coupled via a high-speed interconnect and share a common database at the disk level. This is also known as a "shared disk" approach. We compare database sharing with the database partitioning (shared nothing) approach and discuss the functional DBMS components that require new and coordinated solutions for DB-sharing. The performance of DB-sharing systems critically depends on the protocols used for concurrency and coherency control. The frequency of communication required for these functions has to be kept as low as possible in order to achieve high transation rates and short response times. A trace-driven simulation system for DB-sharing complexes has been developed that allows a realistic performance comparison of four different concurrency and coherency control protocols. We consider two locking and two optimistic schemes which operate either under central or distributed control. For coherency control, we investigate so-called on-request and broadcast invalidation schemes, and employ buffer-to-buffer communication to exchange modified pages directly between different nodes. The performance impact of random routing versus affinity-based load distribution and different communication costs is also examined. In addition, we analyze potential performance bottlenecks created by hot spot pages.