Title
Serializable isolation for snapshot databases
Abstract
Many popular database management systems implement a multiversion concurrency control algorithm called snapshot isolation rather than providing full serializability based on locking. There are well-known anomalies permitted by snapshot isolation that can lead to violations of data consistency by interleaving transactions that would maintain consistency if run serially. Until now, the only way to prevent these anomalies was to modify the applications by introducing explicit locking or artificial update conflicts, following careful analysis of conflicts between all pairs of transactions. This article describes a modification to the concurrency control algorithm of a database management system that automatically detects and prevents snapshot isolation anomalies at runtime for arbitrary applications, thus providing serializable isolation. The new algorithm preserves the properties that make snapshot isolation attractive, including that readers do not block writers and vice versa. An implementation of the algorithm in a relational DBMS is described, along with a benchmark and performance study, showing that the throughput approaches that of snapshot isolation in most cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1376616.1376690
ACM Trans. Database Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
serializable isolation,concurrency control algorithm,serializability theory,new algorithm,snapshot isolation anomaly,data consistency,popular database management system,arbitrary application,offer snapshot isolation,snapshot databases,snapshot isolation,database management system,multiversion concurrency control,databases,concurrency control
Transaction processing,Snapshot isolation,Serializability,Serialization,Concurrency control,Computer science,Concurrency,Multiversion concurrency control,Snapshot (computer storage),Database,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
Citations 
34
4
66
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.70
29
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael J. Cahill1663.04
Uwe Röhm230831.42
Alan David Fekete31610201.97