Meta’s graph store TAO, like many other distributed data stores, has traditionally prioritized availability, efficiency, and horizontal scalability over strong consistency or isolation guarantees to serve its large read-dominant workloads. As product developers built diverse applications on top of this system, we have seen an increasing desire for transactional semantics. In this talk, we first characterize developer desires for transactions that emerged over the years and describe the current failure-atomic (i.e., write) transactions offered by TAO. We highlight the need for atomic visibility in a read transaction API with a measurement study on potential anomalies that occur without stronger isolation for reads. We then present the RAMP-TAO protocol, a variation based on the Read Atomic Multi-Partition (RAMP) protocol, that ensures atomic visibility for a read-optimized workload and an eventually consistent system. We demonstrate that this protocol results in minimal overhead, and our design can be feasibly deployed in production.
- WATCH NOW
- VIEW 2023 EVENTS
- DIVIDER
- EXPLORE TOPICS
- MACHINE LEARNING AND AI
- Data, Systems, and Networking
- ANDROID, VIDEO, AND WEB
- DEV TOOLS AND OPS, PRIVACY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND PERFORMANCE
- Fighting Abuse and Security
- DIVIDER
- Annual @Scale Conference
- Blog
- Community Forum
- About @Scale