Performance-Optimal Read-Only Transactions

Authors: 

Haonan Lu, Princeton University; Siddhartha Sen, Microsoft Research; Wyatt Lloyd, Princeton University

Abstract: 

Read-only transactions are critical for consistently reading data spread across a distributed storage system but have worse performance than simple, non-transactional reads. We identify three properties of simple reads that are necessary for read-only transactions to be performance-optimal, i.e., come as close as possible to simple reads. We demonstrate a fundamental tradeoff in the design of read-only transactions by proving that performance optimality is impossible to achieve with strict serializability, the strongest consistency.

Guided by this result, we present PORT, a performance-optimal design with the strongest consistency to date. Central to PORT are version clocks, a specialized logical clock that concisely captures the necessary ordering constraints. We show the generality of PORT with two applications. Scylla-PORT provides process-ordered serializability with simple writes and shows performance comparable to its non-transactional base system. Eiger-PORT provides causal consistency with write transactions and significantly improves the performance of its transactional base system.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {258939,
author = {Haonan Lu and Siddhartha Sen and Wyatt Lloyd},
title = {{Performance-Optimal} {Read-Only} Transactions},
booktitle = {14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20)},
year = {2020},
isbn = {978-1-939133-19-9},
pages = {333--349},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi20/presentation/lu},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}

Presentation Video