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  4. Distributed Transactional Systems Cannot Be Fast
 
conference paper

Distributed Transactional Systems Cannot Be Fast

Didona, Diego  
•
Fatourou, Panagiota
•
Guerraoui, Rachid  
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2019
Proceedings of the 31st ACM on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
The 31st ACM on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures - SPAA '19

We prove that no fully transactional system can provide fast read transactions (including read-only ones that are considered the most frequent in practice). Specifically, to achieve fast read transactions, the system has to give up support of transactions that write more than one object. We prove this impossibility result for distributed storage systems that are causally consistent, i.e., they do not require to ensure any strong form of consistency. Therefore, our result holds also for any system that ensures a consistency level stronger than causal consistency, e.g., strict serializability. The impossibility result holds even for systems that store only two objects (and support at least two servers and at least four clients). It also holds for systems that are partially replicated. Our result justifies the design choices of state-of-the-art distributed transactional systems and insists that system designers should not put more effort to design fully-functional systems that support both fast read transactions and ensure causal or any stronger form of consistency.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3323165.3323189
Author(s)
Didona, Diego  
Fatourou, Panagiota
Guerraoui, Rachid  
Wang, Jingjing  
Zwaenepoel, Willy  
Date Issued

2019

Published in
Proceedings of the 31st ACM on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
Start page

369

End page

380

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
The 31st ACM on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures - SPAA '19

Phoenix, AZ, USA

June 22 - 24, 2019

Available on Infoscience
July 2, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/158753
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