Jepsen 15: What Even Are Transactions? by Kyle Kingsbury

Databases often promise "ACID transactions", but what does that phrase
actually mean? Using generative testing and fault injection techniques,
we'll look at transaction safety in three systems which take different
approaches not only to replication, but to transaction semantics
themselves. We'll see how MySQL's "Repeatable Read" is not repeatable,
and how MySQL clusters hosted in AWS could routinely violate
Serializability. We'll discuss RavenDB, whose "business transactions"
turned out nowhere close to claimed "ACID" properties. Finally, we'll
explore a system which offers serial inter-transaction but concurrent
intra-transaction semantics, which challenges our intuition about
operation composition under "Serializability".

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