Abstract
To sidestep reasoning about the complex effects of concurrent execution, many system designers have conveniently embraced strict serializability on the strength of its claims, support from commercial and open-source database communities and ubiquitous levels of industry adoption. Crucially, distributed components are built on this model; multiple schedulers are composed in an event-driven architecture to form larger, ostensibly correct systems. This paper examines the oft-misconstrued position of strict serializability as a composable correctness criterion in the design of such systems. An anomaly is presented wherein a strict serializable scheduler in one system produces a history that cannot be serially applied to even a weak prefix-consistent replica in logical timestamp order. Several solutions are presented under varying isolation properties, including novel isolation properties contributed by this paper. It is further shown that every nondeterministic scheduler is anomaly-prone, every nonconcurrent scheduler is anomaly-free, and at least one deterministic concurrent scheduler is anomaly-free.
Highlights
Strict serializability has been much lauded as the holy grail of transactional isolation levels, in the context of distributed systems
One drawback of this method is that Φ-SR is more common among deterministic certifiers than it is among mainstream databases, and the former group appears to be mostly confined to academia
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Consider transaction schedulers of two types: deterministic schedulers, which always produces conflict equivalent histories given the same set of transaction inputs, and nondeterministic schedulers, which may produce arbitrary histories that conform to some overarching isolation property
Summary
Strict serializability has been much lauded as the holy grail of transactional isolation levels, in the context of distributed systems. Most centralised systems that guaranteed serializability delivered strict serializability, without claiming as much. It was not until transaction processing was distributed that the pitfalls of serializability became apparent [4], prior assumptions were challenged and strict serializability emerged as the new ideal. To this day, strict serializability is sold as the gold standard of isolation.
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