Matt Ingenthron in a forum thread:

There is quite a bit of work ongoing to optimize some of these paths, and there are some features coming to allow you to specify that you want to block until a change is durable at either the replication or the disk IO level. I believe use that internally to the server for prioritization as well.

Right now we write things as fast as we can and we constantly scan.

I think I’ve seen this before. And I thought Couchbase Server 2.0 will be using CouchDB durable persistence engine. Couchbase Server 2.0 is still in developer preview so there’s time for this to change. But some clarifications would be welcome.

Original title and link: Couchbase Server 2.0 Durability and Write Performance (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Alex Feinberg explains it again:

Just to expand on this, the “C” in CAP corresponds (roughly) to the “A” and “I” in ACID. Atomicity across multiple nodes requires consensus. According to FLP Impossibility Result (CAP is a very elegant and intuitive re-statement of FLP), consensus is impossible in a network that may drop or deliver packets. Serializable isolation level requires that operations are totally ordered: total ordering on multiple nodes, requires solving the “atomic multicast” problem which is a private instance of the general consensus problem.

In practice, you can achieve consensus across multiple nodes with a reasonable amount of fault tolerance if you are willing to accept high (as in, hundreds of milliseconds) latency bounds. That’s a loss of availability that’s not acceptable to many applications.

This means, that you can’t build a low-latency multi-master system that achieves the “A” and “I” guarantees. Thus, distributed systems that wish to achieve a greater form of consistency typically (Megastore from Google being a notable exception, at the cost of 140ms latency) choose master slave systems (with “floating masters” for fault tolerance). In these systems availability is lost for a short period of time in case the master fails. BigTable (or HBase) is an example of this: (grand simplification follows) when a tablet master (RegionServer in HBase) for a specific token range fails, availability is lost until other nodes take over the “master-less” token range.

These are not binary “on/off” switches: see Yahoo’s PNUTS for a great “middle of the road” system. The paper has an intuitive example explaining the various consistency models.

Note: in a partitioned system, the scope of consistency guarantees (that is, any consistency guarantees: eventual or not) is typically limited to (at best) a single partition of a “table group”/”entity group” (in Microsoft Azure Cloud SQL Server and Google Megastore, respectively), a single partition of a table (usual sharded MySQL setups) or just a single row in a table (BigTable) or document in a document oriented store. Atomic and isolated cross row transactions are impractical on commodity hardware (and are limited even in systems that mandate the use of infiband interconnect and high-performance SSDs).

Alex and Sergio Bossa have previously had an interesting conversation on the topic of consistency from the ACID and CAP perspectives.

Original title and link: C in CAP != C in ACID (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Following a tweet from Nathan Marz:

The problem with relational databases is that they conflate the notions of data and views

Sergio Bossa and Alex Feinberg had a very interesting exchange about the meaning of consistency in the context of ACID and consistency in CAP theorem perspective.

Alex: @nathanmarz That’s reason for confusion between C in ACID and C in CAP: C in ACID means consistent view of data which can be done w/ quorums

Sergio: @strlen That’s a common misconception: ACID C just means your write operations do not break data constraints. It’s not about the view.

Alex: @sbtourist It also refers to not allowing reads of intermediate states i.e., serializability. W/o a quorum, an EC system could allow such.

Alex: @sbtourist On the other hand, an async system where node B is behind node A is still C in the ACID sense without being C in the CAP sense.

Sergio: @strlen Nope, that’s the isolation level (ACID I). Again, ACID C has a precise meaning and it’s about constraints.

Alex: @sbtourist Yeah, I think you are right: serializability would be “I”, with consensus (strongest form of CAP “C”) being about “A” (atomicity)

Sergio: @strlen That said, I strongly agree with you about ACID C being different than CAP C.

Alex: @sbtourist Yes. Both “consistent” and “atomic” mean diff things in DBs than they do elsewhere in systems (e.g., way that “ln -s” is atomic)

There have been many discussions about the loose definitions of the terms in the CAP theorem. Daniel Abadi exposed an interesting perspective on the subject proposing instead PACELC:

To me, CAP should really be PACELC – if there is a partition (P) how does the system tradeoff between availability and consistency (A and C); else (E) when the system is running as normal in the absence of partitions, how does the system tradeoff between latency (L) and consistency (C)?

Original title and link: Consistency in the ACID and CAP Perspectives (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

I’ve already told you about ☞ Chris Gioran’s series on Neo4j internals. Now, he is working on providing support for pluggable JTA compliant transaction managers in Neo4j and details about the current status can be found in his ☞ last post. Anyways, before that he started with a deep dive into the Neo4j transactions and that resulted in 4 (quite long) articles:

• ☞ Write Ahead Log and Deadlock Detection

  In this post I will write a bit about two different components that can be explained somewhat in isolation and upon which higher level components are build. The first is the Write Ahead Log (WAL) and the other is an implementation of a Wait-For graph that is used to detect deadlocks in Neo before they happen.

• ☞ XaResources, Transactions and TransactionManagers

  This time we will look into a higher level than last time, discussing the Transaction class and its implementations, Commands and TransactionManagers, touching a bit first on the subject of XAResources.

• ☞ Xa roundup and consistency

  This post covers Data sources and XA connections, management of XaResources, and putting all these together.

• ☞ A complete run and a conclusion

  Here I will try to follow a path from the initialization of the db engine and through the begin() of a transaction and creation of a Node to the commit and shutdown.

As I’ve estimated in my first mention of this series on Neo4j internals, Chris ends up giving up writing and starting to hack Neo4j:

Truth been told, I have reached a point where I no longer want to write about Neo but instead I want to start hacking it

Original title and link: Neo4j Transactions and JTA (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Firstly, an interesting presentation by Paulo Gaspar (@paulogaspar7) on ☞ Distributed programming and data consistency

Key take-aways:

• The network falacies:

  1. The network is reliable
  2. Latency is zero
  3. Bandwith is infinite
  4. The network is secure
  5. Topology doesn’t change
  6. There is one administrator
  7. Transport cost is zero
  8. The network is homogenous

• CAP Trade-offs:

  • CA without P: Databases providing distributed transactions can only do it while their network is up
  • CP without A: While there is a partition, transactions to an ACID db may be blocked until the partition heals
  • AP without C: Caching provides client-server partition resilience by replicating data, even if the partition prevents verifying if a replica is fresh

Another interesting post on this topic, is ☞ The CAP Theorem Distilled by Sid Anand (@r39132). Under the assumption that “any system needs to support ‘P’” (nb I am not sure why the article is limiting the analysis to this case only), the article compares ‘A’ vs ‘C’ in CAP:

If you choose ‘C’, your system might implement 2-phase commit (a.k.a 2PC) . […]

On the other hand, if you opt for an AP system, you are opening the door to potential data inconsistencies. […] AP systems can get quite complicated (relative to CP systems)

In two subsequent articles, Sid is explaining “eventual consistency” for ☞ non-techies and for ☞ techies . I liked the way Paulo visually represented inconsistency across time in his slides: