Building consistent transactions with inconsistent replication
Irene Y. Zhang, Naveen Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Dan R. K. Ports · 2015
Application programmers increasingly prefer distributed storage systems with strong consistency and distributed transactions (e.g., Google's Spanner) for their strong guarantees and ease of use. Unfortunately, existing transactional storage systems are expensive to use -- in part because they require costly replication protocols, like Paxos, for fault tolerance. In this paper, we present a new approach that makes transactional storage systems more affordable: we eliminate consistency from the replication protocol while still providing distributed transactions with strong consistency to applications.