Revisiting 1-copy equivalence in clustered databases

Recently renewed interest in scalable database systems for shared nothing clusters has been supported by replication protocols based on group communication that are aimed at seamlessly extending the native consistency criteria of centralized database management systems. By using a read-one/write-all-available approach and avoiding the fine-grained synchronization associated with traditional distributed locking, one needs just a single distributed interaction step for each update transaction. Therefore the system can easily be scaled to a large number of replicas, especially, with read intensive loads typical of Web server support environments. In this paper we point out that 1-copy equivalence for causal consistency, which is subsumed by both serializability and snapshot isolation criteria, depends on basic session guarantees that are costly to ensure in clusters, especially in a multi-tier environment. We then point out a simple solution that guarantees causal consistency in the Dat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Rui Carlos Oliveira, José Pereira, Alfrânio Correia Jr., Edward Archibald
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Causal Consistency, Consistency Criteria, Native Consistency Criteria, SAC 2006