Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications

Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications - Agrawal et al. 1987 This is part 4 of a 7 part series on (database) 'Techniques Everyone Should Know.' Here's something you can probably relate to: lots of published performance studies, each showing significant advantages for their preferred system/approach, and yet contradicting each other. What's going on … Continue reading Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications

Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base – Part II

Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base - Gray et al. 1975 This is part 3 of a 7 part series on (database) 'Techniques Everyone Should Know.' Today we'll look at the second part of this paper which introduces the notion of differing degrees of consistency, and how we can … Continue reading Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base – Part II

Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base – Part I

Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base - Gray et al. 1975 This is part 2 of a 7 part series on (database) 'Techniques Everyone Should Know.' This is a paper of two halves, connected by the common theme of locking. The first part of the paper examines the tradeoff … Continue reading Granularity of Locks and Degree of Consistency in a Shared Data Base – Part I

Fast In-memory Transaction Processing using RDMA and HTM

Fast In-memory Transaction Processing using RDMA and HTM - Wei et al. 2015 This paper tries to answer a natural question: with advanced processor features and fast interconnects, can we build a transaction processing system that is at least one order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art systems without using such features? The authors build … Continue reading Fast In-memory Transaction Processing using RDMA and HTM

Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication

Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication - Zhang et al. 2015 Is there life beyond 'beyond distributed transactions?' In this paper, Zhang et al. introduce a layered approach to supporting distribution transactions, showing that a Transactional Application Protocol can be built on top of an Inconsistent Replication protocol (TAPIR). This direction is similar in spirit … Continue reading Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication

High-Performance ACID via Modular Concurrency Control

High-Performance ACID via Modular Concurrency Control - Xie et al. 2015 In yesterday's paper on Existential Consistency at Facebook the authors postulated that a future direction might be to use different consistency mechanisms for different parts of a system. 'High Performance ACID via Modular Concurrency Control' applies a similar idea within the confines of an … Continue reading High-Performance ACID via Modular Concurrency Control

Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity - Bailis et al. 2015 This paper is an absolute joy to read: seasoned database systems researchers conduct a study of real-world applications from the Ruby community and try not to show too much disdain at what they find, whilst pondering what it might all … Continue reading Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions - Bailis et al. 2014 RAMP transactions came up last week as part of the secret sauce in Coordination avoidance in database systems that contributed to a 25x improvement on the TPC-C benchmark. So what exactly are RAMP transactions and why might we need them? As soon as you … Continue reading Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions