ROLA: A New Distributed Transaction Protocol and Its Formal Analysis

Si Liu, Peter Csaba Ölveczky, Keshav Santhanam, Qi Wang, Indranil Gupta, José Meseguer

Abstract: Designers of distributed database systems face the choice between stronger consistency guarantees and better performance. A number of applications only require read atomicity (RA) and prevention of lost updates (PLU). Existing distributed database systems that meet these requirements also provide additional stronger consistency guarantees (such as causal consistency), and therefore incur lower performance. In this paper we define a new distributed transaction protocol, ROLA, that targets applications where only RA and PLU are needed. We formally model ROLA in Maude. We then perform model checking to analyze both the correctness and the performance of ROLA. For correctness, we use standard model checking to analyze ROLA’s satisfaction of RA and PLU. To analyze performance we: (a) use statistical model checking to analyze key performance properties; and (b) compare these performance results with those obtained by analyzing in Maude the well-known protocol Walter. Our results show that ROLA outperforms Walter.