Consistency Without Borders - Alvaro et al. 2013 We closed out last week by looking at the gap that has opened up between application developer needs and what the database community is providing, leading to the widespread adoption of Feral Concurrency Control. Today's paper, written two years earlier, anticipates this problem and discusses the possible ... Continue Reading

The Potential Dangers of Causal Consistency and an Explicit Solution - Bailis et al. 2012 Yesterday we saw how we could get both better performance and stronger consistency by upgrading from eventual consistency to causal consistency. Are there any downsides? With useful semantics, low latency, partition tolerance, and, recently, a demonstrably efficient architecture, causal consistency ... Continue Reading

Bolt-on Causal Consistency - Bailis et al. 2013 "It'll probably be OK" seems to reflect the prevailing application developer's attitude to working with eventually consistent stores. Thanks to the work of Bailis et al. on PBS, we can now quantify that 'probably.' And it looks pretty good at first glance, with 99+% probabilities achievable after ... Continue Reading

Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums - Bailis et al. 2012, and Quantifying Eventual Consistency with PBS - Bailis et al. 2014 'Probabilistically Bounded Staleness... ' was the original VLDB '12 paper, and then the authors were invited to submit an extended version to the VLDB Journal ('Quantifying Eventual Consistency...') which was published in ... Continue Reading