The Serial Safety Net
Tianzheng Wang, Ryan Johnson, Alan David Fekete, Ippokratis Pandis · 2015
Concurrency control (CC) algorithms must trade off strictness for performance, with serializable schemes generally paying high cost---both in runtime overhead such as contention on lock tables, and in wasted efforts by aborting transactions---to prevent anomalies. We propose the serial safety net (SSN), a serializability-enforcing certifier for modern hardware with substantial core count and large main memory. SSN can be applied with minimal overhead on top of various CC schemes that offer higher performance but admit anomalies, e.g., snapshot isolation and read committed.