Relaxing the limitations of serializable transactions in distributed systems
Calton Pu · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1993
e should recognize that other distributed OS primitives such as the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) [4] also require relatively large-size code and non-trivial run-time overhead. Unlike transactions, RPC is considered sufficiently useful and widely adopted. With the continual advance of RISC technology, the cost measured in instruction counts will tend to go down and more users willing to pay. Therefore, we should not blame only the cost of transactions in size and run-time overhead. A more fundamental problem resides in the concept of transactions, specifically, with the serializability correctness criterion. First, practical algorithms that enforce serializability, called concurrency control, restrict system concurrency using smart heuristics. However, as the system grows larger and faster, the restrictions imposed by concurrency control become stricter and system effective concurrency decreases. Second, distributed commit protocols are needed to preserve the global atomicity of distribu