Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP DBMS [pdf]

The author of this paper gave a talk today in UW-Madison about this and his other related works. Sundial is an extension to his previous work called TicToc [1], both of which are governed by the idea called "logical lease."

Logical lease serializes seemingly conflicting transactions by keeping track of logical time of read/write operations, and committing at logical time instead of physical time.

It is hard to get serialization right for DBMS transactions, but this protocol seems straightforward to reason about. Sundial is an application of logical lease in distributed OLTP DBMS, so that transactions can still serialize while using stale cache copies.

I am recently taking some database and computer architecture courses, and this paper seems very relevant to whoever also interested in these fields.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2016.tictoc.sigm...