Concurrency Control Performance Modeling: Alternatives and Implications

January 7, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

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

January 6, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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 I

January 5, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

Fast In-memory Transaction Processing using RDMA and HTM

October 26, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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

Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication

October 21, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

High-Performance ACID via Modular Concurrency Control

October 20, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

September 4, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

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

Quantifying Isolation Anomalies

September 3, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Quantifying Isolation Anomalies - Fekete et al. 2009 Before we get into today's content, for those of you that can be in London for the week of the 14th September the GOTO London conference will be taking place with curated themes from Adrian Cockcroft discussing how we can build systems that are agile, lean, and ... Continue Reading

Eventually Consistent Transactions

August 10, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Eventually Consistent Transactions - Burckhardt et al. 2012 There's another ECOOP'15 paper I'd like to cover this week - Burckhardt et al.'s "Global Sequence Protocol." But that paper builds on the notion of Cloud Types (similar in spirit to CRDTs, and not something I've personally come across before), which in turn builds on work on ... Continue Reading

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions

March 27, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Transaction processing