Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Online Schema Evolution is (Almost) Free for Snapshot Databases

Modern database applications often change their schemas to keep up with the changing requirements. However, support for online and transactional schema evolution remains challenging in existing database systems. Specifically, prior work often takes ad hoc approaches to schema evolution with 'patches' applied to existing systems, leading to many corner cases and often incomplete functionality. Applications therefore often have to carefully schedule downtimes for schema changes, sacrificing availability. This paper presents Tesseract, a new approach to online and transactional schema evolution without the aforementioned drawbacks. We design Tesseract based on a key observation: in widely used multi-versioned database systems, schema evolution can be modeled as data modification operations that change the entire table, i.e., data-definition-as-modification (DDaM). This allows us to support schema almost 'for free' by leveraging the concurrency control protocol. By simple tweaks to existing snapshot isolation protocols, on a 40-core server we show that under a variety of workloads, Tesseract is able to provide online, transactional schema evolution without service downtime, and retain high application performance when schema evolution is in progress.Comment: To appear at Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2023

Key-CRDT stores

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe Internet has opened opportunities to create world scale services. These systems require highavailability and fault tolerance, while preserving low latency. Replication is a widely adopted technique to provide these properties. Different replication techniques have been proposed through the years, but to support these properties for world scale services it is necessary to trade consistency for availability, fault-tolerance and low latency. In weak consistency models, it is necessary to deal with possible conflicts arising from concurrent updates. We propose the use of conflict free replicated data types (CRDTs) to address this issue. Cloud computing systems support world scale services, often relying on Key-Value stores for storing data. These systems partition and replicate data over multiple nodes, that can be geographically disperse over the network. For handling conflict, these systems either rely on solutions that lose updates (e.g. last-write-wins) or require application to handle concurrent updates. Additionally, these systems provide little support for transactions, a widely used abstraction for data access. In this dissertation, we present the design and implementation of SwiftCloud, a Key-CRDT store that extends a Key-Value store by incorporating CRDTs in the system’s data-model. The system provides automatic conflict resolution relying on properties of CRDTs. We also present a version of SwiftCloud that supports transactions. Unlike traditional transactional systems, transactions never abort due to write/write conflicts, as the system leverages CRDT properties to merge concurrent transactions. For implementing SwiftCloud, we have introduced a set of new techniques, including versioned CRDTs, composition of CRDTs and alternative serialization methods. The evaluation of the system, with both micro-benchmarks and the TPC-W benchmark, shows that SwiftCloud imposes little overhead over a key-value store. Allowing clients to access a datacenter close to them with SwiftCloud, can reduce latency without requiring any complex reconciliation mechanism. The experience of using SwiftCloud has shown that adapting an existing application to use SwiftCloud requires low effort.Project PTDC/EIA-EIA/108963/200

Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control

Multi-versioned database systems have the potential to significantly increase the amount of concurrency in transaction processing because they can avoid read-write conflicts. Unfortunately, the increase in concurrency usually comes at the cost of transaction serializability. If a database user requests full serializability, modern multi-versioned systems significantly constrain read-write concurrency among conflicting transactions and employ expensive synchronization patterns in their design. In main-memory multi-core settings, these additional constraints are so burdensome that multi-versioned systems are often significantly outperformed by single-version systems. We propose Bohm, a new concurrency control protocol for main-memory multi-versioned database systems. Bohm guarantees serializable execution while ensuring that reads never block writes. In addition, Bohm does not require reads to perform any book-keeping whatsoever, thereby avoiding the overhead of tracking reads via contended writes to shared memory. This leads to excellent scalability and performance in multi-core settings. Bohm has all the above characteristics without performing validation based concurrency control. Instead, it is pessimistic, and is therefore not prone to excessive aborts in the presence of contention. An experimental evaluation shows that Bohm performs well in both high contention and low contention settings, and is able to dramatically outperform state-of-the-art multi-versioned systems despite maintaining the full set of serializability guarantees

Versioned boxes as the basis for memory transactions

AbstractIn this paper, we propose the use of Versioned Boxes, which keep a history of values, as the basis for language-level memory transactions. Unlike previous work on software transactional memory, in our proposal read-only transactions never conflict with any other concurrent transaction. This may improve significantly the concurrency on applications which have longer transactions and a high read/write ratio.Furthermore, we discuss how we can reduce transaction conflicts by delaying computations and re-executing only parts of a transaction in case of a conflict. We propose two language-level abstractions to support these strategies: the per-transaction boxes and the restartable transactions.Finally, we lay out the basis for a more generic model, which better supports fine-grained restartable transactions. The goal of this new model is to generalize the previous two abstractions to reduce conflicts