A formal characterization of SI-based ROWA replication protocols

Abstract

Snapshot Isolation (SI) is commonly used in some commercial DBMSs with a multiversion concurrency control mechanism since it never blocks read-only transactions. Recent database replication protocols have been designed using SI replicas where transactions are firstly executed in a delegate replica and their updates (if any) are propagated to the rest of replicas at commit time; i.e. they follow the Read One Write All (ROWA) approach. This paper provides a formalization that shows correctness of abstract protocols which cover these replication proposals. These abstract protocols differ in the properties demanded for achieving a global SI level and those needed for its Generalized SI (GSI) variant -allowing reads from old snapshots-. Additionally, we propose two more relaxed properties that also ensure a global GSI level. Thus, some applications can further optimize their performance in a replicated system while obtaining GSI.

Supporting Multiple Isolation Levels in Replicated Environments.

“…To increase the performance of the system, some existing protocols [32,38,5] execute validation and termination separately, allowing validation even if the previous write-sets are not yet applied.…”