Distributed Consistency Beyond Queries
Authors: 
Tim Baccaert, 
Bas KetsmanAuthors Info & Claims
Tim Baccaert, Bas KetsmanAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 47 - 58
Abstract
Programming asynchronous distributed systems is a challenging task in which consistency is often achieved by use of expensive coordination protocols like Paxos and 2PC. The CALM theorem, first conjectured by Hellerstein, is one of the first results to challenge this practice by stating that a problem can have a consistent, coordination-free distributed implementation if (and only if) the problem is monotonic. This result was proven for queries and shown to extend beyond monotonic (yet monotonic-like) queries for data systems having specific knowledge about the partitioning of data over the network. In this article, we extend the latter results in several ways. We consider problems that can be modeled as mappings from distributed instances to distributed instances, enabling insights into a much broader range of problems than queries. Furthermore, our model can express arbitrary system configurations, allowing us to reason about the expressiveness of any particular distributed system and thereby revealing a nuanced gradient of problems with increasing coordination-needs. Finally, we apply our model to a recent question about the expressiveness of coordination-free queries, raised by Hellerstein and Alvaro.
References
[1]
Serge Abiteboul, É milien Antoine, Gerome Miklau, Julia Stoyanovich, and Jules Testard. 2013. Rule-based Application Development Using Webdamlog. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2013), June 22--27, 2013, New York, NY, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 965--968. https://doi.org/10.1145/2463676.2465251
[2]
Peter Alvaro, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and William R. Marczak. 2011. Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach. In Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2011), January 9--12, 2011, Asilomar, CA, USA. CIDR Conference, Online, 249--260. http://cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper35.pdf
[3]
Peter Alvaro, William R. Marczak, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, David Maier, and Russell Sears. 2010. Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space. In Proceedings of Datalog Reloaded: 1st International Workshop (Datalog 2010), March 16--19, 2010, Oxford, UK. Springer, Berlin, Germany, 262--281. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--642--24206--9_16
[4]
Tom J. Ameloot, Jan Van den Bussche, William R. Marczak, Peter Alvaro, and Joseph M. Hellerstein. 2016a. Putting Logic-Based Distributed Systems on Stable Grounds. Theory Pract. Log. Program., Vol. 16, 4 (2016), 378--417. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1471068415000381
[5]
Tom J. Ameloot, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, and Daniel Zinn. 2016b. Weaker Forms of Monotonicity for Declarative Networking: A More Fine-Grained Answer to the CALM-Conjecture. ACM Trans. Database Syst., Vol. 40, 4 (Feb. 2016), 1--45. https://doi.org/10.1145/2809784
[6]
Tom J. Ameloot, Frank Neven, and Jan Van den Bussche. 2013. Relational Transducers for Declarative Networking. J. ACM, Vol. 60, 2 (April 2013), 1--38. https://doi.org/10.1145/2450142.2450151
[7]
Dana Angluin. 1980. Local and Global Properties in Networks of Processors. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 1980), April 28--30, 1980, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 82--93. https://doi.org/10.1145/800141.804655
[8]
K. Mani Chandy and Jayadev Misra. 1986. How Processes Learn. Distributed Comput., Vol. 1, 1 (1986), 40--52. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01843569
[9]
Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses, and Moshe Y. Vardi. 1995. Reasoning About Knowledge. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5803.001.0001
[10]
Joseph M. Hellerstein. 2010. The Declarative Imperative: Experiences and Conjectures in Distributed Logic. SIGMOD Rec., Vol. 39, 1 (2010), 5--19. https://doi.org/10.1145/1860702.1860704
[11]
Joseph M. Hellerstein and Peter Alvaro. 2020. Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency is Easy. Commun. ACM, Vol. 63, 9 (Aug. 2020), 72--81. https://doi.org/10.1145/3369736
[12]
Neil Immerman. 1982. Relational Queries Computable in Polynomial Time (Extended Abstract). In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 5--7, 1982, San Francisco, California, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 147--152. https://doi.org/10.1145/800070.802187
[13]
Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Minos N. Garofalakis, David E. Gay, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Timothy Roscoe, and Ion Stoica. 2009. Declarative Networking. Commun. ACM, Vol. 52, 11 (2009), 87--95. https://doi.org/10.1145/1592761.1592785
[14]
Nancy A. Lynch. 1996. Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington, MA, USA.
[15]
Alan Nash and Bertram Lud"a scher. 2004. Processing First-Order Queries under Limited Access Patterns. In Proceedings of the Twenty-third ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, June 14--16, 2004, Paris, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 307--318. https://doi.org/10.1145/1055558.1055601
[16]
Moshe Y. Vardi. 1982. The Complexity of Relational Query Languages. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 5--7, 1982, San Francisco, California, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 137--146. https://doi.org/10.1145/800070.802186
[17]
Jingren Zhou, Nicolas Bruno, and Wei Lin. 2012. Advanced partitioning techniques for massively distributed computation. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2012, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, May 20--24, 2012, K. Selcc uk Candan, Yi Chen, Richard T. Snodgrass, Luis Gravano, and Ariel Fuxman (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13--24. https://doi.org/10.1145/2213836.2213839
[18]
Daniel Zinn, Todd J. Green, and Bertram Ludäscher. 2012. Win-Move is Coordination-Free (Sometimes). In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2012), March 26--29, 2012, Berlin, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 99--113. https://doi.org/10.1145/2274576.2274588
Index Terms
- Distributed Consistency Beyond Queries
Recommendations
Weaker Forms of Monotonicity for Declarative Networking: A More Fine-Grained Answer to the CALM-Conjecture
Special Issue: Invited 2014 PODS and EDBT Revised ArticlesThe CALM-conjecture, first stated by Hellerstein [2010] and proved in its revised form by Ameloot et al. [2013] within the framework of relational transducer networks, asserts that a query has a coordination-free execution strategy if and only if the ...
Deciding eventual consistency for a simple class of relational transducer networks
ICDT '12: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Database TheoryNetworks of relational transducers can serve as a formal model for declarative networking, focusing on distributed database querying applications. In declarative networking, a crucial property is eventual consistency, meaning that the final output does ...
Weaker forms of monotonicity for declarative networking: a more fine-grained answer to the calm-conjecture
PODS '14: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systemsThe CALM-conjecture, first stated by Hellerstein [23] and proved in its revised form by Ameloot et al. [13] within the framework of relational transducer networks, asserts that a query has a coordination-free execution strategy if and only if the query ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2023
392 pages
ISBN:9798400701276
DOI:10.1145/3584372
- General Chair:
- Floris Geerts,
- Program Chairs:
- Hung Q. Ngo,
- Stavros Sintos
Copyright © 2023 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 18 June 2023
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
- FWO
Conference
SIGMOD/PODS '23
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 184Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)67
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in