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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.7

Robustness against Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility

Authors: Giovanni Bernardi and Alexey Gotsman

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 59, 27th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2016)

Abstract

To achieve scalability, modern Internet services often rely on distributed databases with consistency models for transactions weaker than serializability. At present, application programmers often lack techniques to ensure that the weakness of these consistency models does not violate application correctness. We present criteria to check whether applications that rely on a database providing only weak consistency are robust, i.e., behave as if they used a database providing serializability. When this is the case, the application programmer can reap the scalability benefits of weak consistency while being able to easily check the desired correctness properties. Our results handle systematically and uniformly several recently proposed weak consistency models, as well as a mechanism for strengthening consistency in parts of an application.

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Giovanni Bernardi and Alexey Gotsman. Robustness against Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility. In 27th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2016). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 59, pp. 7:1-7:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)

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@InProceedings{bernardi_et_al:LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.7,
  author =	{Bernardi, Giovanni and Gotsman, Alexey},
  title =	{{Robustness against Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility}},
  booktitle =	{27th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2016)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-017-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{59},
  editor =	{Desharnais, Jos\'{e}e and Jagadeesan, Radha},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-61652},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Robustness, Replication, Consistency models, Transactions}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.58

A Framework for Transactional Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility

Authors: Andrea Cerone, Giovanni Bernardi, and Alexey Gotsman

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 42, 26th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2015)

Abstract

Modern distributed systems often rely on databases that achieve scalability by providing only weak guarantees about the consistency of distributed transaction processing. The semantics of programs interacting with such a database depends on its consistency model, defining these guarantees. Unfortunately, consistency models are usually stated informally or using disparate formalisms, often tied to the database internals. To deal with this problem, we propose a framework for specifying a variety of consistency models for transactions uniformly and declaratively. Our specifications are given in the style of weak memory models, using structures of events and relations on them. The specifications are particularly concise because they exploit the property of atomic visibility guaranteed by many consistency models: either all or none of the updates by a transaction can be visible to another one. This allows the specifications to abstract from individual events inside transactions. We illustrate the use of our framework by specifying several existing consistency models. To validate our specifications, we prove that they are equivalent to alternative operational ones, given as algorithms closer to actual implementations. Our work provides a rigorous foundation for developing the metatheory of the novel form of concurrency arising in weakly consistent large-scale databases.

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Andrea Cerone, Giovanni Bernardi, and Alexey Gotsman. A Framework for Transactional Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility. In 26th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2015). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 42, pp. 58-71, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2015)

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@InProceedings{cerone_et_al:LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.58,
  author =	{Cerone, Andrea and Bernardi, Giovanni and Gotsman, Alexey},
  title =	{{A Framework for Transactional Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility}},
  booktitle =	{26th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2015)},
  pages =	{58--71},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-91-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2015},
  volume =	{42},
  editor =	{Aceto, Luca and de Frutos Escrig, David},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.58},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-53756},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.58},
  annote =	{Keywords: Replication, Consistency models, Transactions}
}

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Robustness against Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility

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A Framework for Transactional Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility

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