William Schultz

Transactions are a core feature of databases, but absent from most mainstream programming languages.

Writing formal proofs for distributed protocols is tedious and usually not worth the effort for real-world systems.

Formal descriptions of message passing distributed protocols are complex and heterogeneous.

We can check correctness of a TLA+ specification using the TLC model checker, which will exhaustively explore a spec’s reachable states to check that a specified property (i.e. an invariant) holds.

The idealized model of a transactional data storage system is one of a sequential, serializable system, where clients can submit transactions and the system ensures the outcomes are as if those transactions were executed against a single copy of that data.

In Andy Grove’s High Output Management, on his experiences from management at Intel, he makes a comment about the value of writing “reports” in a business or organizational setting: But reports also have another totally different function.

The standard use of Raft is for implementing a fault tolerant, replicated state machine by means of a replicated log, maintained at each server within a replication group.

In A Critique of Snapshot Isolation, published in EuroSys 2012, they present write-snapshot isolation, a simple approach to making snapshot isolation serializable.

Database transactions are traditionally modeled as a sequence of read/write operations on a set of keys, where each read operation returns some value and each write sets a key to some value.

There have been many attempts to formalize the zoo of various transaction isolation and consistency concepts over the years.