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TARDiS: A Branch-and-Merge Approach to Weak Consistency

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Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies

Synonyms

Causal consistency; Distributed systems; Eventual consistency

Definitions

This article targets applications that adopt weaker consistency in large-scale distributed systems in favor of higher availability and better performance.

Overview

In light of the conflicting goals of low latency, high availability, and partition tolerance (Brewer 2000; Gilbert and Lynch 2002), many wide-area services and applications choose to renounce strong consistency in favor of eventual (Vogels 2008) or causal consistency (Ahamad et al. 1994): COPS (Lloyd et al. 2011), Dynamo (DeCandia et al. 2007), Riak (Basho 2017), and Voldemort (2012) are among the many services (Lloyd et al. 2011) that provide a form of weak consistency to applications. Applications that make this decision are often referred to as ALPS applications (availability, low latency, partition tolerance, and high scalability). Distributed ALPS applications, however, are hard to reason about: eventual consistency provides no guarantee...

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Correspondence to Natacha Crooks .

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Crooks, N. (2018). TARDiS: A Branch-and-Merge Approach to Weak Consistency. In: Sakr, S., Zomaya, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_160-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_160-1

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