The ACID-Fission: Pay only for what you need

T. Eirich

english

Abstract: Transactions are a well-known and useful computational concept. They embody a concoction of specific computational guarantees usually symbolized by the acronym ACID. ACID transactions exhibit some deficiencies. First, isolation complicates cooperation. Second, atomicity is detrimental to long running computations. Third, the user has to buy either all or none of a transaction's computational guarantees. Approaches to the first two problems are extended transaction models which weaken the strict isolation and atomicity of ACID. For the third problem there is only few work. Common to all these solutions is the unawareness of non-transactional computing. In operating systems and networking environments applications are often reactive. But transactional models do not match the requirements of reactive applications. The acronym ACID is broken up into its elements. The results of this fission are pairs of orthogonal computational guarantees. Guarantees from different pairs can be freely combined. Users can employ exactly those which perfectly match the needs of their applications. We show that extended transaction models can be easily implemented with the proposed guarantees. Because these different extended models are based on the same set of computational guarantees they can be mixed. E.g. nested transactions can be employed in sagas and vice versa. Furthermore, we show that the requirements of reactive applications are also met and illustrate this by sketching the implementation of two typical reactive problems.

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