Rethinking Eventual Consistency
Philip A. Bernstein
Microsoft Research
Thursday, January 23, 2014
11:00 a.m., 1000 SEO Building
Abstract: Heading link
The past five years has seen a resurgence of work on replicated, distributed database systems, to meet the demands of intermittently-connected clients and disaster-tolerant database systems that span data centers. Each product or prototype uses a weakened definition of replica-consistency or isolation, and in some cases new mechanisms, to obtain improvements in partition-tolerance, availability, and performance. In this talk, I?ll present a framework for defining and comparing weaker consistency and isolation properties. I?ll show how these weaker properties affect the programming model and how they are supported by new mechanisms. Although this analysis doesn?t lead to recommending one solution above all others, it does offer a framework to help architects navigate through this complex design space. This is joint work with Sudipto Das, also in MSR.
Bio: Heading link
Philip Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Corporation. Over the past 35 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published over 150 papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and metadata management. His latest work focuses on database systems for cloud computing, middleware for distributed computing, and integration of heterogeneous data in the enterprise and on the web. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.