Timestamp reassignment: taming transaction abort for serializable snapshot isolation

Abstract

Serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) is a promising technique to exploit parallelism for multi-core databases. However, SSI suffers from excessive transaction aborts. Existing remedies have three drawbacks: 1) tracking prohibitively transitive dependencies; 2) aborting on every write-write conflict; and 3) requiring manual annotation on transaction programs. In this paper, we propose to suppress transaction aborts by reassigning timestamps. We combine static analysis with augmented query plan. In this way, we save both aborts caused by read-write and write-write conflicts, without tracking transitive dependency and annotating transaction programs. As such, our approach does not exhibit drawbacks of existing methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach.