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Read atomic transactions with prevention of lost updates: ROLA and its formal analysis

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Designers of distributed database systems face the choice between stronger consistency guarantees and better performance. A number of applications only require read atomicity (RA) (either all or none of a transaction’s updates are visible to other transactions) and prevention of lost updates (PLU). Existing distributed transaction systems that meet these requirements also provide additional stronger consistency guarantees (such as causal consistency), but this comes at the price of lower performance. In this paper we propose a new distributed transaction protocol, ROLA, that targets application scenarios where only RA and PLU are needed. We formally specify ROLA in Maude. We then perform model checking to analyze both the correctness and the performance of ROLA. For correctness, we use standard model checking to analyze ROLA’s satisfaction of RA and PLU. To analyze performance we: (a) perform statistical model checking to analyze key performance properties; and (b) compare these performance results with those obtained by also modeling and analyzing in Maude the well-known protocols Walter and Jessy that also guarantee RA and PLU. Our statistical model checking results show that ROLA outperforms both Walter and Jessy.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Keshav Santhanam, Andrea Cerone, Alexey Gotsman, Jatin Ganhotra, and RohitMukerji for helpful early discussions on this work, and the anonymous reviewers for very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work was supported in part by the following Grants: NSF CNS 1409416, AFOSR/AFRL FA8750-11-2-0084, NRL contract N00173-17-1-G002, and a gift from Microsoft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

    Si Liu, Qi Wang, Indranil Gupta & José Meseguer

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Peter Csaba Ölveczky

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  1. Si Liu
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  2. Peter Csaba Ölveczky
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  3. Qi Wang
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  4. Indranil Gupta
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  5. José Meseguer
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Correspondence to Peter Csaba Ölveczky.

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Liu, S., Ölveczky, P.C., Wang, Q. et al. Read atomic transactions with prevention of lost updates: ROLA and its formal analysis. Form Asp Comp 31, 503–540 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-019-00489-w

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