Liveness of communicating transactions
APLAS'10 Proceedings of the 8th Asian conference on Programming languages and systems
HAT, not CAP: towards highly available transactions
HotOS'13 Proceedings of the 14th USENIX conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
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This paper makes a first attempt to give a precise characterization of liveness in replicated database systems. We introduce the notion of liveness degrees, which express the expectation a database user might have about the termination of transactions, despite concurrency and failures. Our liveness degrees are complementary to the traditional transactional safety degrees (e.g., serializability) and lead to a better characterization of the reliability of replication protocols. We present a generic framework that abstracts several well-known replication protocols and we point out an interesting trade-off between liveness and safety properties in these protocols.