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SUMMARY:Seeing is Believing: A state-based formalization of database isola
 tion - Natacha Crooks (University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Universit
 y)
DTSTART:20170619T140000Z
DTEND:20170619T150000Z
UID:TALK73003@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Liang Wang
DESCRIPTION:This talk asks: is it possible to formalize isolation definiti
 ons in a state-based fashion\, and if so\, why does it matter? Our approac
 h is premised on a simple observation: applications view storage systems a
 s black-boxes that transition through a series of states\, a subset of whi
 ch are observed by applications. Defining isolation guarantees in terms of
  these states frees definitions from implementation-specific assumptions. 
 It makes immediately clear what anomalies\, if any\, applications can expe
 ct to observe\, thus bridging the gap that exists today between how isolat
 ion guarantees are defined and how they are perceived. \n\nUsing this form
 alization\, we find that several well-known guarantees\, previously though
 t to be distinct\, are in fact equivalent\, and that many previously incom
 parable flavors of snapshot isolation can be organized in a clean hierarch
 y. Moreover\, we observe that adopting a state-based view of isolation ope
 ns up new opportunities for implementations of popular isolation levels\, 
 making them resilient to slowdown cascade\, a common phenomenon in datacen
 ters that has inhibited the adoption of stronger isolation and consistency
  levels at scale.\n\nThis talk is based on work that appeared at NSDI'17 a
 nd PODC'17.\n\nBio: Natacha is a final year PhD student at the University 
 of Texas at Austin and Cornell University\, advised by Lorenzo Alvisi. She
  is interested in large-scale distributed systems and databases\, with a f
 ocus on consistency in the context of geo-distributed systems. In the past
 \, she has interned at INRIA Paris\, the Max Planck Institute for Software
  Systems and the database group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Natacha hol
 ds her undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge\, where she w
 as awarded the Redgate prize for the Best Final Year student\, and the Glo
 ucester Research Prize for the Best Final Year Dissertation. She is the re
 cipient of a UT Austin Harrington Fellowship\, a Google Fellowship in Dist
 ributed Computing\, and a Microsoft Research Women's Fellowship\, which no
 w support her research.
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building
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