Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP TransactionsPeter Bailis, Alan Fekete† , Ali Ghodsi, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica
UC Berkeley and † University of Sydney

ABSTRACT
Databases can provide scalability by partitioning data across several
servers. However, multi-partition, multi-operation transactional access is often expensive, employing coordination-intensive locking,validation, or scheduling mechanisms. Accordingly, many realworld systems avoid mechanisms that provide useful semantics for
multi-partition operations. This leads to incorrect behavior for alarge class of applications including secondary indexing, foreign key
enforcement, and materialized view maintenance. In this work, we
identify a new isolation model—Read Atomic (RA) isolation—that
matches the requirements of these use cases by ensuring atomic visibility: either all or none of each transaction’s updates are observed
by other transactions. We present algorithms for Read Atomic MultiPartition (RAMP) transactions that enforce atomic visibility while
offering excellent scalability, guaranteed commit despite partial
failures (via synchronization independence), and minimized communication between servers (via partition independence). These
RAMP transactions correctly mediate atomic visibility of updates
and provide readers with snapshot access to database state by using
limited multi-versioning and by allowing clients to independently
resolve non-atomic reads. We demonstrate that, in contrast with existing algorithms, RAMP transactions incur limited overhead—even
under high contention—and scale linearly to 100 servers.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Faced with growing amounts of data and unprecedented queryvolume, distributed databases increasingly split their data acrossmultiple servers, or partitions, such that no one partition contains
an entire copy of the database [7, 13, 18, 19, 22, 29, 43]. This strategy
succeeds in allowing near-unlimited scalability for operations thataccess single partitions. However, operations that access multiple
partitions must communicate across servers—often synchronously—
in order to provide correct behavior. Designing systems and algorithms that tolerate these communication delays is a difficult task
but is key to maintaining scalability [17, 28, 29, 35].
In this work, we address a largely underserved class of applications requiring multi-partition, atomically visible1 transactional
access: cases where all or none of each transaction’s effects should
be visible. The status quo for these multi-partition atomic transactions provides an uncomfortable choice between algorithms that1
Our use of “atomic” (specifically, Read Atomic isolation) concerns all-or-nothingvisibility of updates (i.e., the ACID isolation effects of ACID atomicity; Section 3).
This differs from uses of “atomicity” to denote serializability [8] or linearizability [4].

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are fast but deliver inconsistent results and algorithms that deliver consistent results but are often slow and unavailable underfailure. Many of the largest modern, real-world systems opt for
protocols that guarantee fast and scalable operation but provide
few—if any—transactional semantics for operations on arbitrary
sets of data items [11, 13, 15, 22, 26, 38, 44]. This results in incorrect behavior for use cases that require atomic visibility, including secondary indexing, foreign key constraint enforcement, andmaterialized view maintenance (Section 2). In contrast, many traditional transactional mechanisms correctly ensure atomicity of
updates [8, 17, 43]. However, these algorithms—such as two-phaselocking and variants of optimistic concurrency control—are often
coordination-intensive, slow, and, under failure, unavailable in a
distributed environment [5, 18, 28, 35]. This dichotomy between
scalability and atomic visibility has been described as “a fact oflife in the big cruel world of huge systems” [25]. The proliferation of non-transactional multi-item operations is symptomatic of awidespread “fear of synchronization” at scale [9].
Our contribution in this paper is to demonstrate that atomicallyvisible transactions on partitioned databases are not at odds withscalability. Specifically, we provide high-performance implementations of a new, non-serializable isolation model called Read Atomic(RA) isolation. RA ensures that all or none of each transaction’s
updates are visible to others and that each transaction reads from anatomic snapshot of database state (Section 3)—this is useful in theapplications we target. We subsequently develop three new, scalable
algorithms for achieving RA isolation that we collectively title Read
Atomic Multi-Partition (RAMP) transactions (Section 4). RAMP
transactions guarantee scalability and outperform existing atomic
algorithms because they satisfy two key scalability constraints. First,
RAMP transactions guarantee synchronization independence: one
client’s transactions cannot cause another client’s transactions tostall or fail. Second, RAMP transactions guarantee partition independence: clients never need to contact partitions that their transactions do not directly reference. Together, these properties ensure
guaranteed completion, limited coordination across partitions, andhorizontal scalability for multi-partition access.
RAMP transactions are scalable because they appropriately control the visibility of updates without inhibiting concurrency. Rather
than force concurrent reads and writes to stall, RAMP transactions
allow reads to “race” writes: RAMP transactions can autonomously
detect the presence of non-atomic (partial) reads and, if necessary,
repair them via a second round of communication with servers. To
accomplish this, RAMP writers attach metadata to each write anduse limited multi-versioning to prevent readers from stalling. The
three algorithms we present offer a trade-off between the size of thismetadata and performance. RAMP-Small transactions require constant space (a timestamp per write) and two round trip time delays(RTTs) for reads and writes. RAMP-Fast transactions require metadata size that is linear in the number of writes in the transaction but
only require one RTT for reads in the common case and two in theworst case. RAMP-Hybrid transactions employ Bloom filters [10] toprovide an intermediate solution. Traditional techniques like locking

couple atomic visibility and mutual exclusion; RAMP transactions
provide the benefits of the former without incurring the scalability,
availability, or latency penalties of the latter.
In addition to providing a theoretical analysis and proofs of correctness, we demonstrate that RAMP transactions deliver in practice.
Our RAMP implementation achieves linear scalability to over 7
million operations per second on a 100 server cluster (at overhead
below 5% for a workload of 95% reads). Moreover, across a rangeof workload configurations, RAMP transactions incur limited overhead compared to other techniques and achieve higher performance
than existing approaches to atomic visibility (Section 5).
While the literature contains an abundance of isolation models [2,5], we believe that the large number of modern applications requiring
RA isolation and the excellent scalability of RAMP transactions
justify the addition of yet another model. RA isolation is too weak
for some applications, but, for the many that it can serve, RAMP
transactions offer substantial benefits.

2.

OVERVIEW AND MOTIVATIONIn this paper, we consider the problem of making transactional
updates atomically visible to readers—a requirement that, as weoutline in this section, is found in several prominent use cases today.
The basic property we provide is fairly simple: either all or none ofeach transaction’s updates should be visible to other transactions.
For example, if a transaction T1 writes x = 1 and y = 1, then anothertransaction T2 should not read x = 1 and y = null. Instead, T2 should
either read x = 1 and y = 1 or, possibly, x = null and y = null.
Informally, each transaction reads from an unchanging snapshot of
database state that is aligned along transactional boundaries. We callthis property atomic visibility and formalize it via the Read Atomic
isolation guarantee in Section 3.
The classic strategy for providing atomic visibility is to ensure
mutual exclusion between readers and writers. For example, if atransaction like T1 above wants to update data items x and y, it
can acquire exclusive locks for each of x and y, update both items,
then release the locks. No other transactions will observe partial
updates to x and y, ensuring atomic visibility. However, this solution
has a drawback: while one transaction holds exclusive locks on x
and y, no other transactions can access x and y for either reads orwrites. By using mutual exclusion to enforce the atomic visibilityof updates, we have also limited concurrency. In our example, if x
and y are located on different servers, concurrent readers and writers
will be unable to perform useful work during communication delays.
These communication delays form an upper bound on throughput:1effectively, message
delay operations per second.
To avoid this upper bound, we separate the problem of providing
atomic visibility from the problem of maintaining mutual exclusion.
By achieving the former but avoiding the latter, the algorithms wedevelop in this paper are not subject to the scalability penalties
of many prior approaches. To ensure that all servers successfully
execute a transaction (or that none do), our algorithms employ an
atomic commitment protocol (ACP). When coupled with a blocking
concurrency control mechanism like locking, ACPs are harmful toscalability and availability: arbitrary failures can (provably) cause
any ACP implementation to stall [8]. (Optimistic concurrency control mechanisms can similarly block during validation.) We instead
use ACPs with non-blocking concurrency control mechanisms; thismeans that individual transactions can stall due to failures or communication delays without forcing other transactions to stall. In a
departure from traditional concurrency control, we allow multiple
ACP rounds to proceed in parallel over the same data.
The end result—our RAMP transactions—provide excellent scalability and performance under contention (e.g., in the event of write

hotspots) and are robust to partial failure. RAMP transactions’ nonblocking behavior means that they cannot provide certain guarantees
like preventing concurrent updates. However, applications that canuse Read Atomic isolation will benefit from our algorithms. The
remainder of this section identifies several relevant use cases fromindustry that require atomic visibility for correctness.

2.1

Read Atomic Isolation in the Wild

As a simple example, consider a social networking application:
if two users, Sam and Mary, become “friends” (a bi-directional
relationship), other users should never see that Sam is a friend of
Mary but Mary is not a friend of Sam: either both relationships
should be visible, or neither should be. A transaction under Read
Atomic isolation would correctly enforce this behavior, and we canfurther classify three general use cases for Read Atomic isolation:1.) Foreign key constraints. Many database schemas contain information about relationships between records in the form of foreign
key constraints. For example, Facebook’s TAO [11], LinkedIn’s
Espresso [38], and Yahoo! PNUTS [15] store information aboutbusiness entities such as users, photos, and status updates as well
as relationships between them (e.g., the friend relationships above).
Their data models often represent bi-directional edges as two distinct uni-directional relationships. For example, in TAO, a user
performing a “like” action on a Facebook page produces updates
to both the LIKES and LIKED_BY associations [11]. PNUTS’s authors describe an identical scenario [15]. These applications require
foreign key maintenance and often, due to their unidirectional relationships, multi-entity update and access. Violations of atomic
visibility surface as broken bi-directional relationships (as with Sam
and Mary above) and dangling or incorrect references (e.g., Frank is
an employee of department.id=5, but no such department exists
in the department table).
With RAMP transactions, when inserting new entities, applications can bundle relevant entities from each side of a foreign key
constraint into a transaction. When deleting associations, users
can “tombstone” the opposite end of the association (i.e., delete
any entries with associations via a special record that signifies deletion) [45] to avoid dangling pointers.
2.) Secondary indexing. Data is typically partitioned acrossservers according to a primary key (e.g., user ID). This allows fast
location and retrieval of data via primary key lookups but makes
access by secondary attributes (e.g., birth date) challenging. There
are two dominant strategies for distributed secondary indexing. First,
the local secondary index approach co-locates secondary indexes
and primary data, so each server contains a secondary index that only
references (and indexes) data stored on its server [7,38]. This allows
easy, single-server updates but requires contacting every partition
for secondary attribute lookups (write-one, read-all), compromisingscalability for read-heavy workloads [11, 17, 38]. Alternatively, theglobal secondary index approach locates secondary indexes (which
may be partitioned, but by a secondary attribute) separately fromprimary data [7, 15]. This alternative allows fast secondary lookups(read-one) but requires multi-partition update (at least write-two).
Real-world services employ either local secondary indexing (e.g.,
Espresso [38], Cassandra, and Google Megastore’s local indexes [7])or non-atomic (incorrect) global secondary indexing (e.g., Espresso
and Megastore’s global indexes, Yahoo! PNUTS’s proposed secondary indexes [15]). The former is non-scalable but correct, while
the latter is scalable but incorrect. For example, in a database
partitioned by id with an incorrectly-maintained global secondary
index on salary, the query ‘SELECT id, salary WHERE salary> 6 ,’ might return records with salary less than $60,000 andomit some records with salary greater than $60,000.

With RAMP transactions, the secondary index entry for a given
attribute can be updated atomically with base data. For example, if
a secondary index is stored as a mapping from secondary attributevalues to sets of item-versions matching the secondary attribute (e.g.,
the secondary index entry for users with blue hair would containa list of user IDs and last-modified timestamps corresponding to
all of the users with attribute hair-color=blue), then insertionsof new primary data require additions to the corresponding index
entry, deletions require removals, and updates require a “tombstone”
deletion from one entry and an insertion into another.
3.) Materialized view maintenance. Many applications precompute (i.e., materialize) queries over data, as in Twitter’s Rainbird
service [44], Google’s Percolator [36], and LinkedIn’s Espresso
systems [38]. As a simple example, Espresso stores a mailbox ofmessages for each user along with statistics about the mailbox messages: for Espresso’s read-mostly workload, it is more efficient tomaintain (i.e., pre-materialize) a count of unread messages rather
than scan all messages every time a user accesses her mailbox [38].
In this case, any unread message indicators should remain in sync
with the messages in the mailbox. However, atomicity violations
will allow materialized views to diverge from the base data (e.g., Susan’s mailbox displays a notification that she has unread messages
but all 63, 201 messages in her inbox are marked as read).
With RAMP transactions, base data and views can be updated
atomically. The physical maintenance of a view depends on its
specification [14, 27], but RAMP transactions provide appropriate
concurrency control primitives for ensuring that changes are delivered to the materialized view partition. For select-project views, a
simple solution is to treat the view as a separate table and perform
maintenance as needed: new rows can be inserted/deleted according
to the specification, and, if necessary, the view can be (re-)computedon demand (i.e., lazy view maintenance [46]). For more complex
views, such as counters, users can execute RAMP transactions over
specialized data structures such as the CRDT G-Counter [40].
In brief: Status Quo. Despite application requirements for Read
Atomic isolation, few large-scale production systems provide it. For
example, the authors of Tao, Espresso, and PNUTS describe several
classes of atomicity anomalies exposed by their systems, ranging
from dangling pointers to the exposure of intermediate states andincorrect secondary index lookups, often highlighting these cases
as areas for future research and design [11, 15, 38]. These systems
are not exceptions: data stores like Bigtable [13], Dynamo [22], andmany popular “NoSQL” [34] and even some “NewSQL” [5] stores
do not provide transactional guarantees for multi-item operations.
The designers of these Internet-scale, real-world systems havemade a conscious decision to provide scalability at the expense ofmulti-partition transactional semantics. Our goal with RAMP transactions is to preserve this scalability but deliver correct, atomicallyvisible behavior for the use cases we have described.

3.

SEMANTICS AND SYSTEM MODEL

In this section, we formalize Read Atomic isolation and, to capture scalability, formulate a pair of strict scalability criteria: synchronization and partition independence. Readers more interested
in RAMP algorithms may wish to proceed to Section 4.

3.1

RA Isolation: Formal Specification

To formalize RA isolation, as is standard [2], we consider orderedsequences of reads and writes to arbitrary sets of items, or transactions. We call the set of items a transaction reads from and writes
to its read set and write set. Each write creates a version of an item
and we identify versions of items by a unique timestamp taken froma totally ordered set (e.g., rational numbers). Timestamps inducea total order on versions of each item (and a partial order acrossversions of different items). We denote version i of item x as xi .
A transaction T j exhibits fractured reads if transaction Ti writes
versions xm and yn (in any order, with x possibly but not necessarilyequal to y), T j reads version xm and version yk , and k < n.
A system provides Read Atomic isolation (RA) if it prevents fractured reads anomalies and also prevents transactions from reading
uncommitted, aborted, or intermediate data. Thus, RA provides
transactions with a “snapshot” view of the database that respects
transaction boundaries (see the Appendix for more details, including
a discussion of transitivity). RA is simply a restriction on write visibility—if the ACID “Atomicity” property requires that all or none ofa transaction’s updates are performed, RA requires that all or noneof a transaction’s updates are made visible to other transactions.

3.2

RA Implications and Limitations

As outlined in Section 2.1, RA isolation matches many of ouruse cases. However, RA is not sufficient for all applications. RA
does not prevent concurrent updates or provide serial access to data
items. For example, RA is an incorrect choice for an applicationthat wishes to maintain positive bank account balances in the eventof withdrawals. RA is a better fit for our “friend” operation because
the operation is write-only and correct execution (i.e., inserting bothrecords) is not conditional on concurrent updates.
From a programmer’s perspective, we have found RA isolation
to be most easily understandable (at least initially) with read-only
and write-only transactions; after all, because RA allows concurrent writes, any values that are read might be changed at any time.
However, read-write transactions are indeed well defined under RA.

3.3

System Model and Scalability

We consider databases that are partitioned, with the set of itemsin the database spread over multiple servers. Each item has a single
logical copy, stored on a server—called the item’s partition—whose
identity can be calculated using the item. Clients forward operations on each item to the item’s partition, where they are executed.
Transaction execution terminates in commit, signaling success, orabort, signaling failure. In our examples, all data items have the nullvalue (?) at database initialization. We do not model replication ofdata items within a partition; this can happen at a lower level of thesystem than our discussion (see Section 4.6) as long as operations
on each item are linearizable [4].
Scalability criteria. As we hinted in Section 1, large-scale deployments often eschew transactional functionality on the premisethat it would be too expensive or unstable in the presence of failureand degraded operating modes [9, 11, 13, 15, 22, 25, 26, 38, 44]. Our
goal in this paper is to provide robust and scalable transactional
functionality, and, so we first define criteria for “scalability”:
Synchronization independence ensures that one client’s transactions
cannot cause another client’s to block and that, if a client can contact the partition responsible for each item in its transaction, thetransaction will eventually commit (or abort of its own volition).
This prevents one transaction from causing another to abort—whichis particularly important in the presence of partial failures—andguarantees that each client is able to make useful progress. In theabsence of failures, this maximizes useful concurrency. In the distributed systems literature, synchronization independence for replicated transactions is called transactional availability [5]. Note that“strong” isolation models like serializability and Snapshot Isolation
violate synchronization independence and limit scalability.

While many applications can limit their data accesses to a single
partition via explicit data modeling [7,19,25,38] or planning [18,35],
this is not always possible. In the case of secondary indexing, there
is a tangible cost associated with requiring single-partition updates(scatter-gather reads), while, in social networks like Facebook andlarge-scale hierarchical access patterns as in Rainbird, perfect partitioning of data accesses is near-impossible. Accordingly:
Partition independence ensures that, in order to execute a transaction, a client never has to contact partitions that its transaction does
not access. Thus, a partition failure only affects transactions thataccess items contained on the partition. This also reduces load on
servers not directly involved in a transaction’s execution. In the distributed systems literature, partition independence for replicated datais called replica availability [5] or genuine partial replication [39].
In addition to the above requirements, we limit the metadata
overhead of algorithms. There are many potential solutions forproviding atomic visibility that rely on storing prohibitive amountsof state. As a straw-man solution, each transaction could sendcopies of all of its writes to every partition it accesses so that readers
observe all of its writes by reading a single item. This provides RA
isolation but requires considerable storage. Other solutions may
require extra data storage proportional to the number of servers in
the cluster or, worse, the database size (Section 6). We will attempt
to minimize this metadata—that is, data that the transaction did
not itself write but which is required for correct execution. In ouralgorithms, we will specifically provide constant-factor metadata
overheads (RAMP-S, RAMP-H) or else overhead linear in transaction
size (but independent of data size; RAMP-F).

4.

RAMP TRANSACTION ALGORITHMS

Given specifications for RA isolation and scalability, we present
algorithms for achieving both. For ease of understanding, we first
focus on providing read-only and write-only transactions with a“last writer wins” overwrite policy, then subsequently discuss how
to perform read/write transactions. Our focus in this section is on
intuition and understanding; we defer all correctness and scalability
proofs to the Appendix, providing salient details inline.
At a high level, RAMP transactions allow reads and writes toproceed concurrently. This provides excellent performance but, inturn, introduces a race condition: one transaction might only read a
subset of another transaction’s writes, violating RA (i.e., fractured
reads might occur). Instead of preventing this race (hampering
scalability), RAMP readers autonomously detect the race (using
metadata attached to each data item) and fetch any missing, in-flightwrites from their respective partitions. To make sure that readers
never have to block for writes to arrive at a partition, writers use a
two-phase (atomic commitment) protocol that ensures that once awrite is visible to readers on one partition, any other writes in thetransaction are present on and, if appropriately identified by version,readable from their respective partitions.
In this section, we present three algorithms that provide a trade-off
between the amount of metadata required and the expected numberof extra reads to fetch missing writes. As discussed in Section 2,
if techniques like distributed locking couple mutual exclusion withatomic visibility of writes, RAMP transactions correctly control
visibility but allow concurrent and scalable execution.

4.1

RAMP-Fast

To begin, we present a RAMP algorithm that, in the race-freecase, requires one RTT for reads and two RTTs for writes, called
RAMP-Fast (abbreviated RAMP-F; Algorithm 1). RAMP-F stores metadata in the form of write sets (overhead linear in transaction size).

C1

C2

BEGIN T1

[w(x1), w(y1)]Px

PylastCommit[x]= ∅versions={}

lastCommit[y]= ∅versions={}

PREPAREx1, md={y}lastCommit[x]= ∅versions={x1}

RESPONSE
preparedy1, md={x}RESPONSE

lastCommit[y]= ∅versions={y1}prepared

COMMIT
tsc=1

PREPARE

lastCommit[x]=1
versions={x1}

BEGIN T2
[r(x), r(y)]GETi=x, tsreq= ∅GETRESPONSE

i=y, tsreq= ∅x1, md={y}vlatest ←{x:1, y:1}

RESPONSEy∅ , md={}

GET

i=y, tsreq=1

RESPONSE
COMMIT T2
resp={x1,y1}

y1, md={x}COMMITRESPONSE
committed

tsc=1

RESPONSE

lastCommit[y]=1
versions={y1}committed

COMMIT T1

Figure 1: Space-time diagram for RAMP-F execution for two
transactions T1 and T2 performed by clients C1 and C2 on partitions Px and Py . Because T1 overlaps with T2 , T2 must perform a second round of reads to repair the fractured read between x and y. T1 ’s writes are assigned timestamp 1. Lightlyshaded boxes represent current partition state (lastCommit andversions), while the single darkly-shaded box encapsulates all
messages exchanged during C2 ’s execution of transaction T2 .
Overview. Each write in RAMP-F (lines 14–21) contains a timestamp (line 15) that uniquely identifies the writing transaction as
well as a set of items written in the transaction (line 16). For now,
combining a unique client ID and client-local sequence number issufficient for timestamp generation (see also Section 4.5).
RAMP-F write transactions proceed in two phases: a first roundof communication places each timestamped write on its respective
partition. In this PREPARE phase, each partition adds the write to its
local database (versions, lines 1, 17–19). A second round of communication marks versions as committed. In this COMMIT phase,
each partition updates an index containing the highest-timestamped
committed version of each item (lastCommit, lines 2, 20–21).
RAMP-F read transactions begin by first fetching the last (highesttimestamped) committed version for each item from its respective
partition (lines 23–30). Using the results from this first round ofreads, each reader can calculate whether it is “missing” any versions(that is, versions that were prepared but not yet committed on their
partitions). Combining the timestamp and set of items from eachversion read (i.e., its metadata) produces a mapping from items totimestamps that represent the highest-timestamped write for eachtransaction that appears in this first-round read set (lines 26–29). Ifthe reader has read a version of an item that has a lower timestamp
than indicated in the mapping for that item, the reader issues asecond read to fetch the missing version (by timestamp) from its
partition (lines 30–32). Once all missing versions are fetched (which
can be done in parallel), the client can return the resulting set ofversions—the first-round reads, with any missing versions replacedby the optional, second round of reads.
By example. Consider the RAMP-F execution depicted in Figure 1.
T1 writes to both x and y, performing the two-round write protocol
on two partitions, Px and Py . However, T2 reads from x and y while
T1 is concurrently writing. Specifically, T2 reads from Px afterPx has committed T1 ’s write to x, but T2 reads from Py before Py
has committed T1 ’s write to y. Therefore, T2 ’s first-round reads
return x = x1 and y = ?, and returning this set of reads would
violate RA. Using the metadata attached to its first-round reads,
T2 determines that it is missing y1 (since vlatest [y] = 1 and 1 > ?)and so T2 subsequently issues a second read from Py to fetch y1 byversion. After completing its second-round read, T2 can safely return
its result set. T1 ’s progress is unaffected by T2 , and T1 subsequently
completes by committing y1 on Py .
Why it works. RAMP-F writers use metadata as a record of intent:a reader can detect if it has raced with an in-progress commit roundand use the metadata stored by the writer to fetch the missing data.
Accordingly, RAMP-F readers only issue a second round of reads inthe event that they read from a partially-committed write transaction(where some but not all partitions have committed a write). In thisevent, readers will fetch the appropriate writes from the not-yetcommitted partitions. Most importantly, RAMP-F readers never haveto stall waiting for a write that has not yet arrived at a partition:
the two-round RAMP-F write protocol guarantees that, if a partitioncommits a write, all of the corresponding writes in the transaction arepresent on their respective partitions (though possibly not committed
locally). As long as a reader can identify the corresponding version
by timestamp, the reader can fetch the version from the respective
partition’s set of pending writes without waiting. To enable this,
RAMP-F writes contain metadata linear in the size of the writingtransaction’s write set (plus a timestamp per write).
RAMP-F requires 2 RTTs for writes: one for PREPARE and one for
COMMIT . For reads, RAMP-F requires one RTT in the absence ofconcurrent writes and two RTTs otherwise.
RAMP timestamps are only used to identify specific versions andin ordering concurrent writes to the same item; RAMP-F transactions
do not require a “global” timestamp authority. For example, if
lastCommit[k] = 2, there is no requirement that a transaction withtimestamp 1 has committed or even that such a transaction exists.

4.2

RAMP-Small: Trading Metadata for RTTs

While RAMP-F requires linearly-sized metadata but provides bestcase one RTT for reads, RAMP-Small (RAMP-S) uses constant-size
metadata but always requires two RTT for reads (Algorithm 2).
RAMP-S and RAMP-F writes are identical, but, instead of attaching
the entire write set to each write, RAMP-S writers only store thetransaction timestamp (line 7). Unlike RAMP-F, RAMP-S readers
issue a first round of reads to fetch the highest committed timestampfor each item from its respective partition (lines 3, 9–11). Once
RAMP-S readers have recieved the highest committed timestamp foreach item, the readers send the entire set of timestamps they received
to the partitions in a second round of communication (lines 13–14).
For each item in the read request, RAMP-S servers return the highesttimestamped version of the item that also appears in the supplied setof timestamps (lines 5–6). Readers subsequently return the resultsfrom the mandatory second round of requests.

Algorithm 1 RAMP-Fast
Server-side Data Structures
1: versions: set of versions hitem, value, timestamp tsv , metadata mdi
2: latestCommit[i]: last committed timestamp for item iServer-side Methods
3: procedure PREPARE(v : version)4:
versions.add(v)5:return6: procedure COMMIT(tsc : timestamp)7:
Its{w.item | w 2 versions ^ w.tsv = tsc }8:
8i 2 Its , latestCommit[i] max(latestCommit[i],tsc )9: procedure GET(i : item, tsreq : timestamp)
10:
if tsreq = 0/ then11:
return v 2 versions : v.item = i ^ v.tsv = latestCommit[item]
12:
else
13:
return v 2 versions : v.item = i ^ v.tsv = tsreq
Client-side Methods
14: procedure PUT _ ALL(W : set of hitem, valuei)
15:
tstx
generate new timestamp16:
Itx
set of items in W
17:parallel-for hi, vi 2 W
18:
v hitem = i, value = v,tsv = tstx , md = (Itx {i})i19:
invoke PREPARE(v) on respective server (i.e., partition)
20:
parallel-for server s : s contains an item in W
21:
invoke COMMIT(tstx ) on s
22: procedure GET _ ALL(I : set of items)
23:
ret
{}
24:
parallel-for i 2 I
25:
ret[i] GET(i, 0)/26:vlatest{} (default value: 1)
27:
for response r 2 ret do28:
for itx 2 r.md do
29:
vlatest [itx ] max(vlatest [itx ], r.tsv )
30:
31:
32:

parallel-for item i 2 I
if vlatest [i] > ret[i].tsv thenret[i] GET(i, vlatest [i])33:

return ret

By example. In Figure 1, under RAMP-S, Px and Py would respectively return the sets {1} and {?} in response to T2 ’s first round ofreads. T2 would subsequently send the set {1, ?} to both Px and Py ,which would return x1 and y1 . (Including ? in the second-round
request is unnecessary, but we leave it in for ease of understanding.)
Why it works. In RAMP-S, if a transaction has committed on some
but not all partitions, the transaction timestamp will be returnedin the first round of any concurrent read transaction accessing thecommitted partitions’ items. In the (required) second round of readrequests, any prepared-but-not-committed partitions will find thecommitted timestamp in the reader-provided set and return the appropriate version. In contrast with RAMP-F, where readers explicitly
provide partitions with a specific version to return in the (optional)
second round, RAMP-S readers defer the decision of which version
to return to the partition, which uses the reader-provided set to decide. This saves metadata but increases RTTs, and the size of theparameters of each second-round GET request is (worst-case) linear
in the read set size. Unlike RAMP-F, there is no requirement to returnthe value of the last committed version in the first round (returning
the version, lastCommit[k], suffices in line 3).

4.3

RAMP-Hybrid: An Intermediate Solution

RAMP-Hybrid (RAMP-H; Algorithm 3) strikes a compromise between RAMP-F and RAMP-S. RAMP-H and RAMP-S write protocols are
identical, but, instead of storing the entire write set (as in RAMP-F),

Algorithm 2 RAMP-Small

Algorithm 3 RAMP-HybridServer-side Data Structures
same as in RAMP-F (Algorithm 1)

Server-side Data Structures
Same as in RAMP-F (Algorithm 1)

Server-side Methods
PREPARE , COMMIT same as in RAMP-F

Server-side Methods
PREPARE , COMMIT same as in RAMP-F
GET same as in RAMP-S

1: procedure GET(i : item, tsset : set of timestamps)2:
if tsset = 0/ then3:
return v 2 versions : v.item = i ^ v.tsv = latestCommit[k]
4:
else
5:
tsmatch = {t | t 2 tsset ^ 9v 2 versions : v.item = i ^ v.tv = t}6:
return v 2 versions : v.item = i ^ v.tsv = max(tsmatch )Client-side Methods
7: procedure PUT _ ALL(W : set of hitem, valuei)
same as RAMP-F PUT _ ALL but do not instantiate md on line 18
8: procedure GET _ ALL(I : set of items)
9:
tsset
{}
10:
parallel-for i 2 I
11:tsset .add(GET(i, 0).ts
/ v)
12:
ret
{}
13:
parallel-for item i 2 I
14:
ret[i] GET(i,tsset )15:
return ret

RAMP-H writers store a Bloom filter [10] representing the transaction
write set (line 1). RAMP-H readers proceed as in RAMP-F, with afirst round of communication to fetch the last-committed version ofeach item from its partition (lines 3–5). Given this set of versions,
RAMP-H readers subsequently compute a list of potentially highertimestamped writes for each item (lines 7–10). Any potentially
missing versions are fetched in a second round of reads (lines 12).
By example. In Figure 1, under RAMP-H, x1 would contain a
Bloom filter with positives for x and y and y? would contain an
empty Bloom filter. T2 would check for the presence of y in x1 ’s
Bloom filter (since x1 ’s version is 1 and 1 > ?) and, finding amatch, conclude that it is potentially missing a write (y1 ). T2 would
subsequently fetch y1 from Py .
Why it works. RAMP-H is effectively a hybrid between RAMP-F
and RAMP-S. If the Bloom filter has no false positives, RAMP-H reads
behave like RAMP-F reads. If the Bloom filter has all false positives,
RAMP-H reads behave like RAMP-S reads. Accordingly, the numberof (unnecessary) second-round reads (i.e., which would not be performed by RAMP-F) is controlled by the Bloom filter false positive
rate, which is in turn (in expectation) proportional to the size of theBloom filter. Any second-round GET requests are accompanied by aset of timestamps that is also proportional in size to the false positive
rate. Therefore, RAMP-H exposes a trade-off between metadata sizeand expected performance. To understand why RAMP-H is safe, we
simply have to show that any false positives (second-round reads)
will not compromise the integrity of the result set; with uniquetimestamps, any reads due to false positives will return null.

4.4

Summary of Basic Algorithms

The RAMP algorithms allow readers to safely race writers without requiring either to stall. The metadata attached to each write
allows readers in all three algorithms to safely handle concurrent
and/or partial writes and in turn allows a trade-off between metadata
size and performance (Table 1): RAMP-F is optimized for fast reads,
RAMP-S is optimized for small metadata, and RAMP-H is, as the namesuggests, a middle ground. RAMP-F requires metadata linear in transaction size, while RAMP-S and RAMP-H require constant metadata.
However, RAMP-S and RAMP-H require more RTTs for reads compared to RAMP-F when there is no race between readers and writers.

Client-side Methods
1: procedure PUT _ ALL(W : set of hitem, valuei)
same as RAMP-F PUT _ ALL but instantiate md on line 18
with Bloom filter containing Itx
2: procedure GET _ ALL(I : set of items)
3:
ret
{}
4:
parallel-for i 2 I
5:ret[i] GET(i, 0)/6:v f etch{}
7:
for version v 2 ret do
8:for version v0 2 ret : v0 6= v do
9:
if v.tsv > v0 .tsv ^ v.md.lookup(v0 .item) ! True then10:v f etch [v0 .item].add(v.tsv )11:parallel-for item i 2 v f etch12:
ret[i] GET(k, v f etch [i]) if GET(k, v f etch [i]) 6= ?
13:
return ret

Algorithm
RAMP-F
RAMP-S
RAMP-H

RTTs/transaction
Metadata (+stamp)
W R (stable) R (O)StoredPer-Request2
1
2
txn items
2
2
2
stamp/item2
1+e2
Bloom filter stamp/item

Table 1: Comparison of basic algorithms: RTTs required forwrites (W), reads (R) without concurrent writes and in theworst case (O), stored metadata and metadata attached to readrequests (in addition to a timestamp for each).
When reads and writes race, in the worst case, all algorithms require
two RTTs for reads. Writes always require two RTTs to prevent
readers from stalling due to missing, unprepared writes.
RAMP algorithms are scalable because clients only contact partitions relative to their transactions (partition independence), andclients cannot stall one another (synchronization independence).
More specifically, readers do not interfere with other readers, writers do not interfere with other writers, and readers and writers canproceed concurrently. When a reader races a writer to the same
items, the writer’s new versions will only become visible to thereader (i.e., be committed) once it is guaranteed that the reader will
be able to fetch all of them (possibly via a second round of communication). A reader will never have to stall waiting for writes toarrive at a partition (for details, see Invariant 1 in the Appendix).

4.5

Additional Details

In this section, we discuss relevant implementation details.
Multi-versioning and garbage collection. RAMP transactions
rely on multi-versioning to allow readers to access versions thathave not yet committed and/or have been overwritten. In our initialpresentation, we have used a completely multi-versioned storageengine; in practice, multi-versioning can be implemented by using
a single-versioned storage engine for retaining the last committed
version of each item and using a “look-aside” store for access toboth prepared-but-not-yet-committed writes and (temporarily) any
overwritten versions. The look-aside store should make preparedversions durable but can—at the risk of aborting transactions in theevent of a server failure—simply store any overwritten versions inmemory. Thus, with some work, RAMP algorithms are portable tolegacy, non-multi-versioned storage systems.
In both architectures, each partition’s data will grow withoutbound if old versions are not removed. If a committed version of
an item is not the highest-timestamped committed version (i.e., acommitted version v of item k where v < lastCommit[k]), it can besafely discarded (i.e., garbage collected, or GCed) as long as noreaders will attempt to access it in the future (via second-round
GET requests). It is easiest to simply limit the running time of readtransactions and GC overwritten versions after a fixed amount of realtime has elapsed. Any read transactions that take longer than this GC
window can be restarted [32, 33]. Therefore, the maximum numberof versions retained for each item is bounded by the item’s update
rate, and servers can reject any client GET requests for versions thathave been GCed (and the read transaction can be restarted). As amore principled solution, partitions can also gossip the timestampsof items that have been overwritten and have not been returned in
the first round of any ongoing read transactions.
Read-write transactions. Until now, we have focused on readonly and write-only transactions. However, we can extend ouralgorithms to provide read-write transactions. If transactions predeclare the data items they wish to read, then the client can executea GET _ ALL transaction at the start of transaction execution to prefetch all items; subsequent accesses to those items can be served
from this pre-fetched set. Clients can buffer any writes and, upontransaction commit, send all new versions to servers (in parallel) via
a PUT _ ALL request. As in Section 3, this may result in anomalies
due to concurrent update but does not violate RA isolation. Given
the benefits of pre-declared read/write sets [18, 35, 43] and write
buffering [17, 41], we believe this is a reasonable strategy. For
secondary index lookups, clients can first look up secondary index
entries then subsequently (within the same transaction) read primarydata (specifying versions from index entries as appropriate).
Timestamps. Timestamps should be unique across transactions,and, for “session” consistency (Appendix), increase on a per-client
basis. Given unique client IDs, a client ID and sequence number
form unique transaction timestamps without coordination. Without
unique client IDs, servers can assign unique timestamps with highprobability using UUIDs and by hashing transaction contents.
Overwrites. In our algorithms, we have depicted a policy in which
versions are overwritten according to a highest-timestamp-winspolicy. In practice, and, for commutative updates, users may wish
to employ a different policy upon COMMIT: for example, perform
set union. In this case, lastCommit[k] contains an abstract data type(e.g., set of versions) that can be updated with a merge operation [22,42] (instead of updateI f Greater) upon commit. This treats eachcommitted record as a set of versions, requiring additional metadata(that can be GCed as in Section 4.7).

4.6

Distribution and Fault Tolerance

RAMP transactions operate in a distributed setting, which poseschallenges due to latency, partial failure, and network partitions.
Synchronization independence ensures that failed clients do notcause other clients to fail, while partition independence ensures thatclients only have to contact partitions for items in their transactions.
This provides fault tolerance and availability as long as clients canaccess relevant partitions, but here we further elucidate RAMP
interactions with replication and stalled operations.
Replication. A variety of mechanisms including traditional databasemaster-slave replication with failover, quorum-based protocols, andstate machine replication and can ensure availability of individual
partitions in the event of individual server failure [8]. To control

durability, clients can wait until the effects of their operations (e.g.,modifications to versions and lastCommit) are persisted locally on
their respective partitions and/or to multiple physical servers before
returning from PUT _ ALL calls (either via master-to-slave replicationor via quorum replication and by performing two-phase commit
across multiple active servers). Notably, because RAMP transactions can safely overlap in time, replicas can process different
transactions’ PREPARE and COMMIT requests in parallel.
Stalled Operations. RAMP writes use a two-phase atomic commitment protocol that ensures readers never block waiting for writes
to arrive. As discussed in Section 2, every ACP may block during failures [8]. However, due to synchronization independence, a
blocked transaction (due to failed clients, failed servers, or network
partitions) cannot cause other transactions to block. Blocked writes
instead act as “resource leaks” on partitions: partitions will retain
prepared versions indefinitely unless action is taken.
To “free” these leaks, RAMP servers can use the Cooperative
Termination Protocol (CTP) described in [8]. CTP can always
complete the transaction except when every partition has performed
PREPARE but no partition has performed COMMIT . In CTP, if aserver S p has performed PREPARE for transaction T but times out
waiting for a COMMIT, S p can check the status of T on any otherpartitions for items in T ’s write set. If another server Sc has received
COMMIT for T , then S p can COMMIT T . If Sa , a server responsible
for an item in T , has not received PREPARE for T , Sa and S p can
promise never to PREPARE or COMMIT T in the future and S p cansafely discard its versions. A client recovering from a failure canread from the servers to determine if they unblocked its write. Writes
that block mid-COMMIT will also become visible on all partitions.
CTP (evaluated in Section 5) only runs when writes block (ortime-outs fire) and runs asynchronously with respect to other operations. CTP requires that PREPARE messages contain a list ofservers involved in the transaction (a subset of RAMP-F metadata but
a superset of RAMP-H and RAMP-S) and that servers remember when
they COMMIT and “abort” writes (e.g., in a log file). Compared toalternatives (e.g., replicating clients [24]), we have found CTP to beboth lightweight and effective.

4.7

Further Optimizations

RAMP algorithms also allow several possible optimizations:
Faster commit detection. If a server returns a version in response
to a GET request and the version’s timestamp is greater than thehighest committed version of that item (i.e., lastCommit), then transaction writing the version has committed on at least one partition.
In this case, the server can mark the version as committed. This
scenario will occur when all partitions have performed PREPARE
and at least one server but not all partitions have performed COMMIT(as in CTP). This allows faster updates to lastCommit (and therefore
fewer expected RAMP-F and RAMP-H RTTs).
Metadata garbage collection. Once all of transaction T ’s writes
are committed on each respective partition (i.e., are reflected in
lastCommit), readers are guaranteed to read T ’s writes (or later
writes). Therefore, non-timestamp metadata for T ’s writes stored in
RAMP-F and RAMP-H (write sets and Bloom filters) can therefore bediscarded. Detecting that all servers have performed COMMIT canbe performed asynchronously via a third round of communication
performed by either clients or servers.
One-phase writes. We have considered two-phase writes, but, if
a user does not wish to read her writes (thereby sacrificing session
guarantees outlined in the Appendix), the client can return after
issuing its PREPARE round (without sacrificing durability). The
client can subsequently execute the COMMIT phase asynchronously,or, similar to optimizations presented in Paxos Commit [24], theservers can exchange PREPARE acknowledgements with one anotherand decide to COMMIT autonomously. This optimization is safe
because multiple PREPARE phases can safely overlap.

5.

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION

We proceed to experimentally demonstrate RAMP transaction
scalability as compared to existing transactional and non-transactional
mechanisms. RAMP-F, RAMP-H, and often RAMP-S outperform existing solutions across a range of workload conditions while exhibiting overheads typically within 8% and no more than 48% of peakthroughput. As expected from our theoretical analysis, the performance of our RAMP algorithms does not degrade substantially
under contention and scales linearly to over 7.1 million operations
per second on 100 servers. These outcomes validate our choice topursue synchronization- and partition-independent algorithms.

5.1

Experimental Setup

To demonstrate the effect of concurrency control on performanceand scalability, we implemented several concurrency control algorithms in a partitioned, multi-versioned, main-memory database
prototype. Our prototype is in Java and employs a custom RPC
system with Kryo 2.20 for serialization. Servers are arranged asa distributed hash table with partition placement determined byrandom hashing. As in stores like Dynamo [22], clients can connect to any server to execute operations, which the server will perform on their behalf (i.e., each server acts as a client in our RAMP
pseudocode). We implemented RAMP-F, RAMP-S, and RAMP-H andconfigure a wall-clock GC window of 5 seconds as described in
Section 4.5. RAMP-H uses a 256-bit Bloom filter based on an implementation of MurmurHash2.0, with four hashes per entry; todemonstrate the effects of filter saturation, we do not modify theseparameters in our experiments. Our prototype utilizes the “Fastercommit detection” optimization from Section 4.5 but we chose notto employ the latter two optimizations in order to preserve session
guarantees and because metadata overheads were generally minor.
Algorithms for comparison. As a baseline, we do not employ any
concurrency control (denoted NWNR, for no write and no read locks);
reads and writes take one RTT and are executed in parallel.
We also consider three lock-based mechanisms: long write locks
and long read locks, providing Repeatable Read isolation (PL-2.99;
denoted LWLR), long write locks with short read locks, providing
Read Committed isolation (PL-2L; denoted LWSR; does not provide
RA), and long write locks with no read locks, providing Read Uncommitted isolation [2] (LWNR; also does not provide RA). While
only LWLR provides RA, LWSR and LWNR provide a useful basis forcomparison, particularly in measuring concurrency-related locking
overheads. To avoid deadlocks, the system lexicographically orders
lock requests by item and performs them sequentially. When locks
are not used (as for reads in LWNR and reads and writes for NWNR),
the system parallelizes operations.
We also consider an algorithm where, for each transaction, designated “coordinator” servers enforce RA isolation—effectively,
the Eiger system’s 2PC-PCI mechanism [33] (denoted E-PCI; Section 6). Writes proceed via prepare and commit rounds, but any reads
that arrive at a partition and overlap with a concurrent write to thesame item must contact a (randomly chosen, per-write-transaction)“coordinator” partition to determine whether the coordinator’s prepared writes have been committed. Writes require two RTTs, whilereads require one RTT during quiescence and two RTTs in the presence of concurrent updates (to a variable number of coordinatorpartitions—linear in the number of concurrent writes to the item).

Using a coordinator violates partition independence but not synchronization independence. We optimize 2PC-PCI reads by having
clients determine a read timestamp for each transaction (eliminating
an RTT) and do not include happens-before metadata.
This range of lock-based strategies (LWNR, LWSR, LWNR), recent
comparable approach (E-PCI), and best-case (NWNR; no concurrency
control) baseline provides a spectrum of strategies for comparison.
Environment and benchmark. We evaluate each algorithm using the YCSB benchmark [16] and deploy variably-sized sets ofservers on public cloud infrastructure. We employ cr1.8xlarge
instances on Amazon EC2 and, by default, deploy five partitions onfive servers. We group sets of reads and sets of writes into read-only
and write-only transactions (default size: 4 operations), and use thedefault YCSB workload (workloada, with Zipfian distributed item
accesses) but with a 95% read and 5% write proportion, reflecting
read-heavy applications (Section 2, [11, 33, 44]; e.g., Tao’s 500 to
1 reads-to-writes [11, 33], Espresso’s 1000 to 1 Mailbox application [38], and Spanner’s 3396 to 1 advertising application [17]).
By default, we use 5000 concurrent clients split across 5 separate
EC2 instances and, to fully expose our metadata overheads, use avalue size of 1 byte per write. We found that lock-based algorithms
were highly inefficient for YCSB’s default 1K item database, so we
increased the database size to 1M items by default. Each version
contains a timestamp (64 bits), and, with YCSB keys (i.e., item IDs)of size 11 bytes and a transaction length L, RAMP-F requires 11L
bytes of metadata per version, while RAMP-H requires 32 bytes. We
successively vary several parameters, including number of clients,
read proportion, transaction length, value size, database size, andnumber of servers and report the average of three sixty-second trials.

5.2

Experimental Results: Comparison

Our first set of experiments focuses on two metrics: performancecompared to baseline and performance compared to existing techniques. The overhead of RAMP algorithms is typically less than
8% compared to baseline (NWNR) throughput, is sometimes zero, andis never greater than 50%. RAMP-F and RAMP-H always outperformthe lock-based and E-PCI techniques, while RAMP-S outperforms
lock-based techniques and often outperforms E-PCI. We proceed todemonstrate this behavior over a variety of conditions:
Number of clients. RAMP performance scales well with increased
load and incurs little overhead (Figure 2). With few concurrent
clients, there are few concurrent updates and therefore few secondround reads; performance for RAMP-F and RAMP-H is close to oreven matches that of NWNR. At peak throughput (at 10,000 clients),
RAMP-F and RAMP-H pay a throughput overhead of 4.2% compared
to NWNR. RAMP-F and RAMP-H exhibit near-identical performance; the
RAMP-H Bloom filter triggers few false positives (and therefore few
extra RTTs compared to RAMP-F). RAMP-S incurs greater overhead
and peaks at almost 60% of the throughput of NWNR. Its guaranteed
two-round trip reads are expensive and it acts as an effective lower
bound on RAMP-F and RAMP-H performance. In all configurations,the algorithms achieve low latency (RAMP-F, RAMP-H, NWNR less than
35ms on average and less than 10 ms at 5,000 clients; RAMP-S lessthan 53ms, 14.3 ms at 5,000 clients).
In comparison, the remaining algorithms perform less favorably.
In contrast with the RAMP algorithms, E-PCI servers must check acoordinator server for each in-flight write transaction to determine
whether to reveal writes to clients. For modest load, the overheadof these commit checks places E-PCI performance between thatof RAMP-S and RAMP-H. However, the number of in-flight writes
increases with load (and is worsened due to YCSB’s Zipfian distributed accesses), increasing the number of E-PCI commit checks.

RAMP-F

RAMP-S

RAMP-H

NWNR

LWNR

90K
60K
30K
0

2000

4000

6000

8000

102

0

1

2000

4000
6000
Concurrent Clients

8000

10000

Figure 2: Throughput and latency under varying client load.
We omit latencies for LWLR, which peaked at over 1.5s.
This in turn decreases throughput, and, with 10,000 concurrent
clients, E-PCI performs so many commit checks per read (over 20%
of reads trigger a commit check, and, on servers with hot items,
each commit check requires indirected coordinator checks for an
average of 9.84 transactions) that it underperforms the LWNR lockbased scheme. Meanwhile, multi-partition locking is expensive [35]:with 10,000 clients, the most efficient algorithm, LWNR, attains only
28.6% of the throughput of NWNR, while the least efficient, LWLR,
attains only 1.6% (peaking at 3,412 transactions per second).
We subsequently varied several other workload parameters, which
we briefly discuss below and plot in Figure 3:
Read proportion.
Increased write activity leads to a greaternumber of races between reads and writes and therefore additional
second-round RTTs for RAMP-F and RAMP-H reads. With all write
transactions, all RAMP algorithms are equivalent (two RTT) andachieve approximately 65% of the throughput of NWNR. With allreads, RAMP-F, RAMP-S, NWNR, and E-PCI are identical, with a single RTT. Between these extremes, RAMP-F and RAMP-S scale nearlinearly with the write proportion. In contrast, lock-based protocols
fare poorly as contention increases, while E-PCI again incurs penalties due to commit checks.
Transaction length. Increased transaction lengths have variable
impact on the relative performance of RAMP algorithms. Synchronization independence does not penalize long-running transactions,but, with longer transactions, metadata overheads increase. RAMP-F
relative throughput decreases due to additional metadata (linear intransaction length) and RAMP-H relative performance also decreases
as its Bloom filters saturate. (However, YCSB’s Zipfian-distributed
access patterns result in a non-linear relationship between lengthand throughput.) As discussed above, we explicitly decided not totune RAMP-H Bloom filter size but believe a logarithmic increase in
filter size could improve RAMP-H performance for large transaction
lengths (e.g., 1024 bit filters should lower the false positive rate fortransactions of length 256 from over 92% to slightly over 2%).
Value size. Value size similarly does not seriously impact relative
throughput. At a value size of 1B, RAMP-F is within 2.3% of NWNR.
However, at a value size of 100KB, RAMP-F performance nearlymatches that of NWNR: the overhead due to metadata decreases, andwrite request rates slow, decreasing concurrent writes (and subse-

Throughput (txn/s)

10

120K
90K
60K
30K
0

25

50
Percentage Reads)

75

100

180K

101
10

E-PCI

150K

0

10000

150K
120K
90K
60K
30K
0

2

4

8
16
32
Transaction Size (operations)

64

128

180K
Throughput (txn/s)

Avg. Latency (ms)Throughput (txn/s)

120K

0

LWLR

180K

150K

150K
120K
90K
60K
30K
0

1

10

0
10

100

100
1000
Value Size (bytes)

10000

100000

1M

10M

180K
Throughput (txn/s)

Throughput (txn/s)

180K

LWSR

150K
120K
90K
60K
30K
1000
10K
100K
Database Size (items)

Figure 3: Algorithm performance across varying workload conditions. RAMP-F and RAMP-H exhibit similar performance to NWNR
baseline, while RAMP-S’s 2 RTT reads incur a greater performance penalty across almost all configurations. RAMP transactions consistently outperform RA isolated alternatives.
quently second-round RTTs). Nonetheless, absolute throughput
drops by a factor of 24 as value sizes moves from 1B to 100KB.
Database size. RAMP algorithms are robust to high contention fora small set of items: with only 1000 items in the database, RAMP-F
achieves throughput within 3.1% of NWNR. RAMP algorithms arelargely agnostic to read/write contention, although, with fewer itemsin the database, the probability of races between readers and inprogress writers increases, resulting in additional second-roundreads for RAMP-F and RAMP-H. In contrast, lock-based algorithms
fare poorly under high contention, while E-PCI indirected commit
checks again incurred additional overhead. By relying on clients(rather than additional partitions) to repair fractured writes, RAMP-F,
RAMP-H, and RAMP-S performance is less affected by hot items.
Overall, RAMP-F and RAMP-H exhibit performance close to that ofno concurrency control due to their independence properties andguaranteed worst-case performance. As the proportion of writes

operations/s/server

Throughput (ops/s)

NWNR

RAMP-F

RAMP-H

RAMP-S

8M
6M
4M
2M
0

200K
160K
120K
80K
40K
0

0

25

50

75

100

0

25

50
Number of Servers

75

100

Figure 4: RAMP transactions scale linearly to over 7 million
operations/s with comparable performance to NWNR baseline.
increases, an increasing proportion of RAMP-F and RAMP-H operations take two RTTs and performance trends towards that of RAMP-S,
which provides a constant two RTT overhead. In contrast, lockbased protocols perform poorly under contention while E-PCI triggers more commit checks than RAMP-F and RAMP-H trigger second
round reads (but still performs well without contention and for particularly read-heavy workloads). The ability to allow clients to
independently verify read sets enables good performance despite arange of (sometimes adverse) conditions (e.g., high contention).

5.3

Experimental Results: CTP Overhead

We also evaluated the overhead of blocked writes in our implementation of the Cooperative Termination Protocol discussed in
Section 4.6. To simulate blocked writes, we artificially dropped
a percentage of COMMIT commands in PUT _ ALL calls such thatclients returned from writes early and partitions were forced to complete the commit via CTP. This behavior is worse than expected
because “blocked” clients continue to issue new operations. The
table below reports the throughput reduction as the proportion ofblocked writes increases (compared to no blocked writes) for aworkload of 100% RAMP-F write transactions:
Blocked %Throughput

0.01%
No change

0.1%
99.86%

25%
77.53%

50%
67.92%As these results demonstrate, CTP can reduce throughput because
each commit check consumes resources (here, network and CPU
capacity). However, CTP only performs commit checks in the eventof blocked writes (or time-outs; set to 5s in our experiments), soa modest failure rate of 1 in 1000 writes has a limited effect. The
higher failure rates produce a near-linear throughput reduction but,in practice, a blocking rate of even a few percent is likely indicativeof larger systemic failures. As Figure 3 hints, the effect of additional
metadata for the participant list in RAMP-H and RAMP-S is limited,
and, for our default workload of 5% writes, we observe similar
trends but with throughput degradation of 10% or less across theabove configurations. This validates our initial motivation behindthe choice of CTP: average-case overheads are small.

5.4

Experimental Results: Scalability

We finally validate our chosen scalability criteria by demonstrating linear scalability of RAMP transactions to 100 servers. We
deployed an increasing number of servers within the us-west-2
EC2 region and, to mitigate the effects of hot items during scaling, configured uniform random access to items. We were unable

to include more than 20 instances in an EC2 “placement group,”
which guarantees 10 GbE connections between instances, so, past 20
servers, servers communicated over a degraded network. Around 40
servers, we exhausted the us-west-2b “availability zone” (datacenter) capacity and had to allocate our instances across the remaining
zones, further degrading network performance. However, as shownin Figure 4, each RAMP algorithm scales linearly, even though in
expectation, at 100 servers, all but one in 100M transactions is amulti-partition operation. In particular, RAMP-F achieves slightly
under 7.1 million operations per second, or 1.79 million transactions
per second on a set of 100 servers (71, 635 operations per partition
per second). At all scales, RAMP-F throughput was always within
10% of NWNR. With 100 servers, RAMP-F was within 2.6%, RAMP-S
within 3.4%, and RAMP-S was within 45% of NWNR. In light of ourscalability criteria, this behavior is unsurprising.

6.

RELATED WORK

Replicated databases offer a broad spectrum of isolation guarantees at varying costs to performance and availability [8]:Serializability. At the strong end of the isolation spectrum isserializability, which provides transactions with the equivalent ofa serial execution (and therefore also provides RA). A range oftechniques can enforce serializability in distributed databases [3, 8],
multi-version concurrency control (e.g. [37]) locking (e.g. [31]), andoptimistic concurrency control [41]. These useful semantics comewith costs in the form of decreased concurrency (e.g., contention
and/or failed optimistic operations) and limited availability during
partial failure [5, 21]. Many designs [19, 29] exploit cheap serializability within a single partition but face scalability challenges for
distributed operations. Recent industrial efforts like F1 [41] andSpanner [17] have improved performance via aggressive hardware
advances but, their reported throughput is still limited to 20 and 250
writes per item per second. Multi-partition serializable transactions
are expensive and, especially under adverse conditions, are likely toremain expensive [18, 28, 35].
Weak isolation. The remainder of the isolation spectrum is morevaried. Most real-world databases offer (and often default to) nonserializable isolation models [5, 34]. These “weak isolation” levels
allow greater concurrency and fewer system-induced aborts compared to serializable execution but provide weaker semantic guarantees. For example, the popular choice of Snapshot Isolation prevents
Lost Update anomalies but not Write Skew anomalies [2]; by preventing Lost Update, concurrency control mechanisms providing
Snapshot Isolation violate synchronization independence [5]. In
recent years, many “NoSQL” designs have avoided cross-partitiontransactions entirely, effectively providing Read Uncommitted isolation in many industrial databases such PNUTS [15], Dynamo [22],TAO [11], Espresso [38], Rainbird [44], and BigTable [13]. Thesesystems avoid penalties associated with stronger isolation but in turnsacrifice transactional guarantees (and therefore do not offer RA).
Related mechanisms. There are several algorithms that are closely
related to our choice of RA and RAMP algorithm design.
COPS-GT’s two-round read-only transaction protocol [32] issimilar to RAMP-F reads—client read transactions identify causallyinconsistent versions by timestamp and fetch them from servers.
While COPS-GT provides causal consistency (requiring additional
metadata), it does not support RA isolation for multi-item writes.
Eiger provides its write-only transactions [33] by electing a coordinator server for each write. As discussed in Section 5 (E-PCI), thenumber of “commit checks” performed during its read-only transactions is proportional to the number of concurrent writes. Usinga coordinator violates partition independence but in turn provides

causal consistency. This coordinator election is analogous to GStore’s dynamic key grouping [19] but with weaker isolation guarantees; each coordinator effectively contains a partitioned completed
transaction list from [12]. Instead of relying on indirection, RAMP
transaction clients autonomously assemble reads and only require
constant factor (or, for RAMP-F, linear in transaction size) metadata
size compared to Eiger’s PL-2L (worst-case linear in database size).
RAMP transactions are inspired by our earlier proposal for Monotonic Atomic View (MAV) isolation: transactions read from a monotonically advancing view of database state [5]. MAV is strictly
weaker than RA and does not prevent fractured reads, as requiredfor our applications (i.e., reads are not guaranteed to be transactionally aligned). The prior MAV algorithm we briefly sketchedin [5] is similar to RAMP-F but, as a consequence of its weakersemantics, allows one-round read transactions. The RAMP algorithms described here are portable to the highly available (i.e., nonlinearizable, “AP/EL” [1, 23]) replicated setting of [5], albeit withnecessary penalties to latency between updates and their visibility.
Overall, we are not aware of a concurrency control mechanism forpartitioned databases that provides synchronization independence,
partition independence, and at least RA isolation.

7.

CONCLUSION

This paper described how to achieve atomically visible multipartition transactions without incurring the performance and availability penalties of traditional algorithms. We first identified a newisolation level—Read Atomic isolation—that provides atomic visibility and matches the requirements of a large class of real-world
applications. We subsequently achieved RA isolation via scalable,
contention-agnostic RAMP transactions. In contrast with techniquesthat use inconsistent but fast updates, RAMP transactions provide
correct semantics for applications requiring secondary indexing, foreign key constraints, and materialized view maintenance while maintaining scalability and performance. By leveraging multi-versioning
with a variable but small (and, in two of three algorithms, constant)amount of metadata per write, RAMP transactions allow clients todetect and assemble atomic sets of versions in one to two rounds ofcommunication with servers (depending on the RAMP implementation). The choice of synchronization and partition independentalgorithms allowed us to achieve near-baseline performance across avariety of workload configurations and scale linearly to 100 servers.
While RAMP transactions are not appropriate for all applications,the many for which they are well suited will benefit measurably.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Peter Alvaro,
Giselle Cheung, Neil Conway, Aaron Davidson, Mike Franklin, Aurojit Panda, Nuno Preguiça, Edward Ribeiro, Shivaram Venkataraman, and the SIGMOD reviewers for their insightful feedback.
This research is supported by NSF CISE Expeditions award CCF1139158 and DARPA XData Award FA8750-12-2-0331, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (grantDGE-1106400), and gifts from Amazon Web Services, Google, SAP,Apple, Inc., Cisco, Clearstory Data, Cloudera, EMC, Ericsson, Facebook, GameOnTalis, General Electric, Hortonworks, Huawei, Intel,
Microsoft, NetApp, NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Oracle, Samsung, Splunk, VMware, WANdisco and Yahoo!.

8.

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APPENDIX: Proofs and Isolation Details
RAMP-F Correctness. To prove RAMP-F provides RA isolation, we showthat the two-round read protocol returns a transactionally atomic set ofversions. To do so, we formalize criteria for atomic (read) sets of versions
in the form of companion sets. We will call the set of versions produced
by a transaction sibling versions and call two items from the same write set
sibling items.
Given two versions xi and y j , we say that xi is a companion to y j if xi
is a transactional sibling of y j or x is a sibling item of y j and i > j. We
say that a set of versions V is a companion set if, for every pair (xi , y j ) of
versions in V where x is a sibling item of y j , xi is a companion to y j . In
Figure 1, the versions returned by T2 ’s first round of reads ({x1 , y? }) do
not comprise a companion set because y? has a lower timestamp than x1 ’s
sibling version of y (that is, x1 has sibling version y1 and but ? < 1 so y?
has too low of a timestamp). Subsets of companion sets are also companion
sets and companion sets also have a useful property for RA isolation:
Claim 1 (Companion sets are atomic). Companion sets do not containfractured reads.
Proof. Claim 1 follows from the definitions of companion sets and fractured
reads. If V is a companion set, then every version xi 2 V is also a companion
to every other version y j 2 V where v j contains x in its sibling items. If V
contained fractured reads, V would contain two versions xi , y j such that thetransaction that wrote y j also wrote a version xk , i < k. However, in this case,xi would not be a companion to y j , a contradiction. Therefore, V cannot
contain fractured reads.
To provide RA, RAMP-F clients assemble a companion set for the requested
items (in vlatest ), which we prove below:
Claim 2. RAMP-F provides Read Atomic isolation.
Proof. Each write in RAMP-F contains information regarding its siblings,
which can be identified by item and timestamp. Given a set of RAMP-F
versions, recording the highest timestamped version of each item (as recorded
either in the version itself or via sibling metadata) yields a companion setof item-timestamp pairs: if a client reads two versions xi and y j such thatx is in y j ’s sibling items but i < j, then vlatest [x] will contain j and noti. Accordingly, given the versions returned by the first round of RAMP-F
reads, clients calculate a companion set containing versions of the requested
items. Given this companion set, clients check the first-round versions
against this set by timestamp and issue a second round of reads to fetch
any companions that were not returned in the first round. The resulting
set of versions will be a subset of the computed companion set and will
therefore also be a companion set. This ensures that the returned results do
not contain fractured reads. RAMP-F first-round reads access lastCommit, so
each transaction corresponding to a first-round version is committed, and,
therefore, any siblings requested in the (optional) second round of reads
are also committed. Accordingly, RAMP-F never reads aborted or non-final(intermediate) writes. This establishes that RAMP-F provides RA.
RAMP-F Scalability and Independence. RAMP-F also provides the independence guarantees from Section 3.3. The following invariant overlastCommit is core to RAMP-F GET request completion:
Invariant 1 (Companions present). If a version xi is referenced by lastCommit(that is, lastCommit[x] = i), then each of xi ’s sibling versions are present inversions on their respective partitions.
Invariant 1 is maintained by RAMP-F’s two-phase write protocol. lastCommit
is only updated once a transaction’s writes have been placed into versions
by a first round of PREPARE messages. Siblings will be present in versions(but not necessarily lastCommit).
Claim 3. RAMP-F provides synchronization independence.
Proof. Clients in RAMP-F do not communicate or coordinate with one another and only contact servers. Accordingly, to show that RAMP-F provides
synchronization independence, it suffices to show that server-side operations
always terminate. PREPARE and COMMIT methods only access data stored
on the local partition and do not block due to external coordination or othermethod invocations; therefore, they complete. GET requests issued in thefirst round of reads have tsreq = ? and therefore will return the version corresponding to lastCommit[k], which was placed into versions in a previously
completed PREPARE round. GET requests issued in the second round ofclient reads have tsreq set to the client’s calculated vlatest [k]. vlatest [k] is a
sibling of a version returned from lastCommit in the first round, so, due toInvariant 1, the requested version will be present in versions. Therefore, GET
invocations are guaranteed access to their requested version and can return
without waiting. The success of RAMP-F operations do not depend on the
success or failure of other clients’ RAMP-F operations.
Claim 4. RAMP-F provides partition independence.
Proof. RAMP-F transactions do not access partitions that are unrelated to eachtransaction’s specified data items and servers do not contact other servers inorder to provide a safe response for operations.
RAMP-S Correctness. RAMP-S writes and first-round reads proceed identically to RAMP-F writes, but the metadata written and returned is different.
Therefore, the proof is similar to RAMP-F, with a slight modification for thesecond round of reads.
Claim 5. RAMP-S provides Read Atomic isolation.
Proof. To show that RAMP-S provides RA, it suffices to show that RAMP-S
second-round reads (resp) are a companion set. Given two versions xi , y j 2
resp such that x 6= y, if x is a sibling item of y j , then xi must be a companion
to y j . If xi were not a companion to y j , then it would imply that x is nota sibling item of y j (so we are done) or that j > i. If j > i, then, due
to Invariant 1 (which also holds for RAMP-S writes due to identical write
protocols), y j ’s sibling is present in versions on the partition for x and would
have been returned by the server (line 6), a contradiction. Each second-round
GET request returns only one version, so we are done.
RAMP-S Scalability and Independence. RAMP-S provides synchronization independence and partition independence. For brevity, we again omit
full proofs, which closely resemble those of RAMP-F.
RAMP-H Correctness. The probabilistic behavior of the RAMP-H Bloom
filter admits false positives. However, given unique transaction timestamps(Section 4.5), requesting false siblings by timestamp and item does not affectcorrectness:
Claim 6. RAMP-H provides Read Atomic isolation.
Proof. To show that RAMP-H provides Read Atomic isolation, it suffices toshow that any versions requested by RAMP-H second-round reads that would
not have been requested by RAMP-F second-round reads (call this set v f alse )do not compromise the validity of RAMP-H’s returned companion set. Anyversions in v f alse do not exist: timestamps are unique, so, for each version
xi , there are no versions x j of non-sibling items with the same timestamp as
xi (i.e., where i = j). Therefore, requesting versions in v f alse do not change
the set of results collected in the second round.
RAMP-H Scalability and Independence. RAMP-H provides synchronization independence and partition independence. We omit full proofs, whichclosely resemble those of RAMP-F. The only significant difference from
RAMP-F is that second-round GET requests may return ?, but, as we showed
above, these empty responses correspond to false positives in the Bloom
filter and therefore do not affect correctness.
Comparison to other isolation levels. The fractured reads anomaly issimilar to Adya’s “Missing Transaction Updates” definition, only applied to
immediate read dependencies (rather than all transitive dependencies). RA
is stronger than PL-2 (Read Committed), but weaker than PL-SI, PL-CS, andPL-2.99 (notably, RA does not prevent anti-dependency cycles, or Adya’s
G2 or G-SIa—informally, it allows concurrent updates) [2].
RA does not (by itself) provide ordering guarantees across transactions.
Our RAMP implementations provide a variant of PRAM consistency, where,
for each item, each user’s writes are serialized [30] (i.e., “session” ordering [20]), and, once a user’s operation completes, all other users will observe
its effects (regular register semantics, applied at the transaction level). This
provides transitivity with respect to each user’s operations. For example,
if a user updates her privacy settings and subsequently posts a new photo,
the photo cannot be read without the privacy setting change [15]. However,
PRAM does not respect the happens-before relation [4] across users. If
Sam reads Mary’s comment and replies to it, other users may read Sam’scomment without Mary’s comment. In this case, RAMP transactions canleverage explicit causality [6] via foreign key dependencies, but happensbefore is not provided by default. If required, we believe it is possible toenforce happens-before but, due to scalability concerns regarding metadataand partition independence (e.g., [6] and Section 5), do not further explore
this possibility. An “active-active” replicated implementation can provide
available [5, 23] operation at the cost of these recency guarantees.