HAT, Not CAP: Towards Highly Available Transactions

Authors: 

Peter Bailis, University of California, Berkeley; Alan Fekete, University of Sydney; Ali Ghodsi, University of California, Berkeley and KTH/Royal Institute of Technology; Joseph M. Hellerstein and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley 

Abstract: 

While the CAP Theorem is often interpreted to preclude the availability of transactions in a partition-prone environment, we show that highly available systems can provide useful transactional semantics, often matching those of today’s ACID databases. We propose Highly Available Transactions (HATs) that are available in the presence of partitions. HATs support many desirable ACID guarantees for arbitrary transactional sequences of read and write operations and permit low-latency operation.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {181978,
author = {Peter Bailis and Alan Fekete and Ali Ghodsi and Joseph M. Hellerstein and Ion Stoica},
title = {{HAT}, Not {CAP}: Towards Highly Available Transactions},
booktitle = {14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XIV)},
year = {2013},
address = {Santa Ana Pueblo, NM},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos13/session/bailis},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may,
}
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