In the second seminar, I will discuss the tension between providing strong isolation guarantees (which greatly simplify the task of programming concurrent applications) and trying to maximize these applications' performance. Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70's with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID's strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement that started a decade ago with Amazon's Dynamo was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is this dichotomy between performance and ease of programming? In my talk, I'll share with you the intellectual journey my students and embarked on trying to overcome the traditional terms of this classic tradeoff.
01/10/2021