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Multi-shot distributed transaction commit

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Abstract

Atomic Commit Problem (ACP) is a single-shot agreement problem similar to consensus, meant to model the properties of transaction commit protocols in fault-prone distributed systems. We argue that ACP is too restrictive to capture the complexities of modern transactional data stores, where commit protocols are integrated with concurrency control, and their executions for different transactions are interdependent. As an alternative, we introduce Transaction Certification Service (TCS), a new formal problem that captures safety guarantees of multi-shot transaction commit protocols with integrated concurrency control. TCS is parameterized by a certification function that can be instantiated to support common isolation levels, such as serializability and snapshot isolation. We then derive a provably correct crash-resilient protocol for implementing TCS through successive refinement. Our protocol achieves a better time complexity than mainstream approaches that layer two-phase commit on top of Paxos-style replication.

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Notes

  1. In practice, the client only needs to send the data relevant to the corresponding shard. We omit this optimisation to simplify notation.

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Acknowledgements

Alexey Gotsman was supported by a Starting Grant RACCOON from the European Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK

    Gregory Chockler

  2. IMDEA Software Institute, Campus Montegancedo s/n, Pozuelo de Alarcón, 28223, Madrid, Spain

    Alexey Gotsman

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  1. Gregory Chockler
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  2. Alexey Gotsman
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Correspondence to Alexey Gotsman.

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This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper that received a Best Paper Award at the 32nd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)

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Chockler, G., Gotsman, A. Multi-shot distributed transaction commit. Distrib. Comput. 34, 301–318 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-021-00389-4

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