Formalizing and Validating the P-Store Replicated Data Store in Maude

Part 4: Regular PapersInternational audienceP-Store is a well-known partially replicated transactional data store that combines wide-area replication, data partition, some fault tolerance, serializability, and limited use of atomic multicast. In addition, a number of recent data store designs can be seen as extensions of P-Store. This paper describes the formalization and formal analysis of P-Store using the rewriting logic framework Maude. As part of this work, this paper specifies group communication commitment and defines an abstract Maude model of atomic multicast, both of which are key building blocks in many data store designs. Maude model checking analysis uncovered a non-trivial error in P-Store; this paper also formalizes a correction of P-Store whose analysis did not uncover any flaw

Read Atomic Transactions with Prevention of Lost Updates: ROLA and its Formal Analysis

Designers of distributed database systems face the choice between stronger consistency guarantees and better performance. A number of applications only require read atomicity (RA) (either all or none of a transaction's updates are visible to other transactions) and prevention of lost updates (PLU). Existing distributed transaction systems that meet these requirements also provide additional stronger consistency guarantees (such as causal consistency), but this comes at the price of lower performance. In this paper we propose a new distributed transaction protocol, ROLA, that targets application scenarios where only RA and PLU are needed. We formally specify ROLA in Maude. We then perform model checking to analyze both the correctness and the performance of ROLA. For correctness, we use standard model checking to analyze ROLA's satisfaction of RA and PLU. To analyze performance we: (a) perform statistical model checking to analyze key performance properties; and (b) compare these performance results with those obtained by also modeling and analyzing in Maude the well-known protocols Walter and Jessy that also guarantee RA and PLU. Our statistical model checking results show that ROLA outperforms both Walter and Jessy.Ope