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A read-only transaction anomaly under snapshot isolation

Published: 01 September 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Snapshot Isolation (SI), is a multi-version concurrency control algorithm introduced in [BBGMOO95] and later implemented by Oracle. SI avoids many concurrency errors, and it never delays read-only transactions. However it does not guarantee serializability. It has been widely assumed that, under SI, read-only transactions always execute serializably provided the concurrent update transactions are serializable. The reason for this is that all SI reads return values from a single instant of time when all committed transactions have completed their writes and no writes of non-committed transactions are visible. This seems to imply that read-only transactions will not read anomalous results so long as the update transactions with which they execute do not write such results. In the current note, however, we exhibit an example contradicting these assumptions: it is possible for an SI history to be non-serializable while the sub-history containing all update transactions is serializable.

References

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{BBGMOO95} H. Berenson, P. Bernstein, J. Gray, J. Melton, E. O'Neil, and P. O'Neil. A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels. Proc. of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1995. Pages 1--10.
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{BHG87} P. A. Bernstein, V. Hadzilacos, and N. Goodman. Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Addison Wesley, 1987. (This text is now out of print but can be downloaded from http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/ccontrol/default.htm)
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{BLL00} A. Bernstein, P. Lewis and S. Lu. Semantic Conditions for Correctness at Different Isolation Levels. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, 2000. Pages 57--66.
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{F99} A. Fekete. Serializability and Snapshot Isolation. Proceedings of the Australian Database Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, January 1999. Pages 201--210.
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{GR93} J. N. Gray and A. Reuter. Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1993.
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{JAC95} K. Jacobs, with contributors: R. Bamford, G. Doherty, K. Haas, M. Holt, F. Putzolu, B. Quigley. Concurrency Control: Transaction Isolation and Serializability in SQL92 and Oracle7. Oracle White Paper, Part No. A33745, July, 1995.
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMOD Record
ACM SIGMOD Record  Volume 33, Issue 3
September 2004
94 pages
ISSN:0163-5808
DOI:10.1145/1031570
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2004
Published in SIGMOD Volume 33, Issue 3

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