PhD Seminar • Data Systems — Generalized Transaction Durability Model

Jaemyung Kim, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Transaction durability guarantees the ability to recover committed transactions from failures. However, making every transaction durable impacts transaction processing performance. Some ad-hoc durability mechanisms (e.g., delayed durability) improve performance, but they risk transactions losing their effects due to failures. The current one-size-fits-all transaction durability model does not solve this problem.

We propose a new generalized transaction durability model to trade-off performance and durability and argue that transactions should also provide flexible durability like they provide multiple isolation levels. We evaluate the performance of a modified PostgreSQL that supports the new durability model using a micro-benchmark to show the durability/performance trade-offs.