Review of "Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems"

Scalability is hugely important in today's world, and communication/coordination is the bane of scaling. This paper works towards reducing the amount of coordination necessary for maintaining correctness, a very important problem.

The main idea is to analyze transaction sets against application invariants to determine when exactly coordination is necessary, in contrast to traditional database systems which serialize all transactions. By only coordinating when absolutely necessary, many transactions can run independently in parallel.

A trade-off here is complexity vs. speed. It is much easier to reason about transactions as completely serializable, and you don't need to write down all of your invariants, but this will often be worth it in a high performance setting.

This work seems very interesting - I feel that most literature I have seen uses the same concurrency scheme for all transactions, and the idea of predetermining which transactions actually need coordination seems like it will have a lot of practical benefits as systems scale larger and larger. I can definitely see this being influential in 10 years.