Abstract
Many distributed applications require transactions. However, transactional protocols that require strong synchronization are costly in large scale environments. Two properties help with scalability of a transactional system: genuine partial replication (GPR), which leverages the intrinsic parallelism of a workload, and snapshot isolation (SI), which decreases the need for synchronization. We show that under standard assumptions (data store accesses are not known in advance, and transactions may access arbitrary objects in the data store), it is impossible to have both SI and GPR. Our impossibility result is based on a novel decomposition of SI which proves that, like serializability, SI is expressible on plain histories.
This work is partially supported by FCT/MCT projects PEst-OE/E-EI/UI0527/2011 and PTDC/EIA-EIA/108963/2008, and the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) under grant agreement No. 318809 (LEADS).
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Keywords
- Transactional Memory
- Impossibility Result
- Software Transactional Memory
- Snapshot Isolation
- Concurrent Transaction
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Saeida Ardekani, M., Sutra, P., Shapiro, M., Preguiça, N. (2013). On the Scalability of Snapshot Isolation. In: Wolf, F., Mohr, B., an Mey, D. (eds) Euro-Par 2013 Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8097. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40047-6_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40047-6_39
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