Title
On the complexity of checking transactional consistency
Abstract
Transactions simplify concurrent programming by enabling computations on shared data that are isolated from other concurrent computations and are resilient to failures. Modern databases provide different consistency models for transactions corresponding to different tradeoffs between consistency and availability. In this work, we investigate the problem of checking whether a given execution of a transactional database adheres to some consistency model. We show that consistency models like read committed, read atomic, and causal consistency are polynomial-time checkable while prefix consistency and snapshot isolation are NP-complete in general. These results complement a previous NP-completeness result concerning serializability. Moreover, in the context of NP-complete consistency models, we devise algorithms that are polynomial time assuming that certain parameters in the input executions, e.g., the number of sessions, are fixed. We evaluate the scalability of these algorithms in the context of several production databases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3360591
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Keywords
Field
DocType
axiomatic specifications, consistency, testing, transactional databases
Programming language,Computer science,Transactional leadership
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
3
OOPSLA
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ranadeep Biswas100.34
Constantin Enea224926.95