Eventual Durability

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Abstract

For latency-critical transactional applications, durability is often what limits performance. That is, executing transactions is fast, but guaranteeing that they are durable is slow. As a result, most of each transaction’s latency is attributable to durability. To address this problem, some database systems allow applications to sacrifice durability guarantees in exchange for lower transaction latencies. These ad hoc techniques are effective, but they can make it difficult for applications to understand and manage the risks associated with failures. In this paper, our goal is to offer a more principled foundation for these kinds of performance/durability tradeoffs. The major obstacle to doing this is the transaction model itself, because it couples transaction durability with transaction commit. That is, the model defines a single point at which a transaction becomes visible and durable. This forces all transaction guarantees to wait for the slowest one, which is often durability. The primary contribution of this work is a new eventually durable transaction model, which decouples commit from durability. Transactions commit first, and become durable later. We argue for making this model the basis of the contract between transactional data systems and applications. We describe what it means to correctly implement eventually durable transactions, and consider how they can be exposed to applications. We also describe a prototype implementation of eventual durability in PostgreSQL, and show that it enables applications to reduce transaction latencies while managing the durability risks.