Robustness against Read Committed for Transaction Templates

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model and algorithms to identify transaction workloads that can safely run under Read Committed isolation without sacrificing serializability, enabling higher throughput and efficiency.

Contribution

It presents an expressive model and tractable algorithms for robustness analysis, expanding the set of workloads that can safely use Read Committed isolation.

Findings

Robust workloads under RC can be evaluated faster than under stricter levels.

The approach identifies larger robust subsets than previous methods.

Selective promotion of reads to updates can improve performance significantly.

Abstract

The isolation level Multiversion Read Committed (RC), offered by many database systems, is known to trade consistency for increased transaction throughput. Sometimes, transaction workloads can be safely executed under RC obtaining the perfect isolation of serializability at the lower cost of RC. To identify such cases, we introduce an expressive model of transaction programs to better reason about the serializability of transactional workloads. We develop tractable algorithms to decide whether any possible schedule of a workload executed under RC is serializable (referred to as the robustness problem). Our approach yields robust subsets that are larger than those identified by previous methods. We provide experimental evidence that workloads that are robust against RC can be evaluated faster under RC compared to stronger isolation levels. We discuss techniques for making workloads robust against RC by promoting selective read operations to updates. Depending on the scenario, the performance improvements can be considerable. Robustness testing and safely executing transactions under the lower isolation level RC can therefore provide a direct way to increase transaction throughput without changing DBMS internals.