Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases

The rise of Internet-scale geo-replicated services has led to considerable upheaval in the design of modern data management systems. Namely, given the availability, latency, and throughput penalties associated with classic mechanisms such as serializable transactions, a broad class of systems (e.g., "NoSQL") has sought weaker alternatives that reduce the use of expensive coordination during system operation, often at the cost of application integrity. When can we safely forego the cost of this expensive coordination, and when must we pay the price?

 

In this talk, I will discuss the potential for coordination avoidance -- the use of as little coordination as possible while still ensuring application integrity -- in several modern data-intensive domains. Specifically, I will demonstrate how to leverage the semantic requirements of applications in data serving, transaction processing, and statistical analytics to enable more efficient distributed algorithms and system designs. The prototype systems I have built demonstrate order-of-magnitude speedups compared to their traditional, coordinated counterparts on a variety of tasks, including referential integrity and index maintenance, transaction execution under common isolation models, and asynchronous convex optimization. I will also discuss our experiences studying and optimizing a range of open source applications and systems, which exhibit similar results.