Robustness against Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility

November 28, 2016

Bernardi Giovanni (IRIF)

To achieve scalability, modern Internet services often rely on
distributed databases with consistency models for transactions
weaker than serializability.
At present, application programmers often lack techniques to ensure
that the weakness of these consistency models does not violate
application correctness.
In this talk I will present criteria to check whether applications
that rely on a database providing only weak consistency are robust,
i.e., behave as if they used a database providing serializability,
and I will focus on a consistency model called Parallel Snapshot Isolation.
The results I will outline handle systematically and uniformly several
recently proposed weak consistency models, as well as a mechanism for
strengthening consistency in parts of an application.