Publications

Totally-Ordered Prefix Parallel Snapshot Isolation

PaPoC@EuroSys: Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, 2021

Authors

Nuno Faria ,
José Pereira

Digital Object Identifier

Abstract

Distributed data management systems have increasingly been using variants of Snapshot Isolation (SI) as their transactional isolation criteria as it combines strong ACID guarantees with non-blocking reads and scalability. However, most existing proposals are limited by the performance of update propagation and stability detection, in particular, when execution and storage are disaggregated. In this paper, we propose TOPSI, an approach providing a restricted form of Parallel Snapshot Isolation (PSI) that allows partially ordering recent transactions to avoid waiting for remote updates or using a stale snapshot. Moreover, it has the interesting property of making a prefix of history in all sites converge to a common total order. This allows versions to be represented by a single scalar timestamp for certification and storage in a shared store. We demonstrate the impact on throughput and abort rate with a proof-of-concept implementation and the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3447865.3457966,
	author = {Faria, Nuno and Pereira, Jos\'{e}},
	title = {Totally-Ordered Prefix Parallel Snapshot Isolation},
	year = {2021},
	isbn = {9781450383387},
	publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3447865.3457966},
	doi = {10.1145/3447865.3457966},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data},
	articleno = {6},
	numpages = {7},
	keywords = {transactional consistency, Parallel Snapshot Isolation},
	location = {Online, United Kingdom},
	series = {PaPoC '21}
}