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FSTTCS
2003
Springer

An Equational Theory for Transactions

14 years 5 months ago
An Equational Theory for Transactions
Abstract. Transactions are commonly described as being ACID: Allor-nothing, Consistent, Isolated and Durable. However, although these words convey a powerful intuition, the ACID properties have never been given a precise semantics in a way that disentangles each property from the others. Among the benefits of such a semantics would be the ability to trade-off the value of a property against the cost of its implementation. This paper gives a sound equational semantics for the transaction properties. We define three categories of actions, A-actions, I-actions and D-actions, while we view Consistency as an induction rule that enables us to derive system-wide consistency from local consistency. The three kinds of action can be nested, leading to different forms of transactions, each with a well-defined semantics. Conventional transactions are then simply obtained as ADI-actions. From the equational semantics we develop a formal proof principle for transactional programs, from which we...
Andrew P. Black, Vincent Cremet, Rachid Guerraoui,
Added 06 Jul 2010
Updated 06 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2003
Where FSTTCS
Authors Andrew P. Black, Vincent Cremet, Rachid Guerraoui, Martin Odersky
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