CEP-15: Fast General Purpose Transactions
Reading group: Louis Farcot Lafond presented "CEP-15: Fast General Purpose Transactions" at 1A312 the 15/12/2023 at 10h00.
Abstract
Modern applications replicate and shard their state to achieve fault tolerance and scalable performance. This presents a coordination problem that modern databases address using leader-based techniques that entail trade-offs: either a scalability bottleneck or weaker isolation. Recent advances in leaderless protocols that claim to address this coordination problem have not yet translated into production systems. This paper outlines distinct performance compromises entailed by existing leaderless protocols in comparison to leader-based approaches. We propose techniques to address these short-comings and describe a new distributed transaction protocol ACCORD, integrating these techniques. ACCORD is the first protocol to achieve the same steady-state performance as leader-based protocols under important conditions such as contention and failure, while delivering the benefits of leaderless approaches to scaling, transaction isolation and geo-distributed client latency. We propose that this combination of features makes ACCORD uniquely suitable for implementing general purpose transactions in Apache Cassandra.
