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Seeing is Believing: A Client-Centric Specification of Database Isolation

Authors:

Natacha Crooks,

Lorenzo Alvisi,

Allen ClementAuthors Info & Claims

PODC '17: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Pages 73 - 82

https://doi.org/10.1145/3087801.3087802

Published: 25 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces the first state-based formalization of isolation guarantees. Our approach is premised on a simple observation: applications view storage systems as black-boxes that transition through a series of states, a subset of which are observed by applications. Defining isolation guarantees in terms of these states frees definitions from implementation-specific assumptions. It makes immediately clear what anomalies, if any, applications can expect to observe, thus bridging the gap that exists today between how isolation guarantees are defined and how they are perceived. The clarity that results from definitions based on client-observable states brings forth several benefits. First, it allows us to easily compare the guarantees of distinct, but semantically close, isolation guarantees. We find that several well-known guarantees, previously thought to be distinct, are in fact equivalent, and that many previously incomparable flavors of snapshot isolation can be organized in a clean hierarchy. Second, freeing definitions from implementation-specific artefacts can suggest more efficient implementations of the same isolation guarantee. We show how a client-centric implementation of parallel snapshot isolation can be more resilient to slowdown cascades, a common phenomenon in large-scale datacenters.

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Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences

PODC '17: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 2017

480 pages

ISBN:9781450349925

DOI:10.1145/3087801

General Chair:
Elad Michael Schiller
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
,
Program Chair:
Alexander A. Schwarzmann
University of Connecticut, USA

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 25 July 2017

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PODC '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 154 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 740 of 2,477 submissions, 30%

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Zhang JTan C(2024)Simplifying Snapshot Isolation: A New Definition, Equivalence, and Efficient CheckingProceedings of the 11th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3642976.3653032(23-29)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639207
Huang KLiu SChen ZWei HBasin DLi HPan A(2023)Efficient Black-Box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in DatabasesProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3583140.358314516:6(1264-1276)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
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Zhang JJi YMu STan CFedorova ANarayanan DDi Luna GQuerzoni L(2023)Viper: A Fast Snapshot Isolation CheckerProceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3552326.3567492(654-671)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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