A curated selection of materials discussing transactional and non-transactional consistency models.
Granularity of locks and degrees of consistency in a shared data base, Gray et al., (1976). (Degrees 0-3)
How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs. Lamport, (1979). (Sequential Consistency)
PRAM: A Scalable Shared Memory, Lipton et al., (1988). (PRAM)
Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects, Herlihy et al., (1990). (Linearizability)
ANSI SQL-92, (1992). (Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Serializability)
Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data, Terry et al., (1994). (Read Your Writes, Monotonic Reads, Writes Follow Reads, Monotonic Writes)
A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels, Berenson et al., (1995). (ANSI Snapshot Isolation)
Weak consistency: A generalized theory and optimistic implementations for distributed transactions, Adya. (1999). (Graph-based isolation level definitions of PL-{2+, 2L, SI, FCV, MSR, CS, SU})
Generalized Isolation Level Definitions, Adya et al., (2000). (Graph-based isolation level definitions of PL-{1, 2, 2.99, 3})
A read-only transaction anomaly under snapshot isolation, Fekete et al., (2004).
Database Replication Using Generalized Snapshot Isolation, Elnikety et al., (2005). (Generalised Snapshot Isolation, Prefix Consistent SI, Conventional SI)
Lazy Database Replication with Snapshot Isolation, Daudjee et al., (2006). (Strong SI, Strong Session SI, Weak SI)
Eventually Consistent, Vogels, (2009). (Eventual, Causal, Read Your Writes, Session Monotonic Read, Monotonic Write Consistency)
Transactional storage for geo-replicated systems, Sovran et al., (2011). (Parallel Snapshot Isolation)
Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball, Terry, (2013). (Consistent Prefix, Bounded Staleness, Monotonic Reads, Read My Writes, Eventual, and Strong Consistency)
Non-Monotonic Snapshot Isolation: scalable and strong consistency for geo-replicated transactional systems, Ardekani et al., (2013). (Non-Monotonic Snapshot Isolation)
Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations (Extended Version), Bailis et al., (2014). (Monotonic Atomic View)
Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions, Bailis et al., (2014). (Read Atomic)
A Framework for Transactional Consistency Models with Atomic Visibility, Cerone et al., (2015). (Isolation level definitions based on visibility and arbitration)
Consistency in Non-Transactional Distributed Storage Systems, Viotti et al., (2016). (Excellent survey of non-transactional semantics)
Seeing is Believing: A Client-Centric Specification of Database Isolation, Crooks et al., (2017). (State-based isolation level definitions)
Fast General Distributed Transactions with Opacity, Shamis et al., (2019). (Opacity)
Elle: Inferring Isolation Anomalies from Experimental Observations, Kingsbury et al., (2021).
Additional relevant papers can be found here.
- Introduction to Transaction Isolation Levels
- Correctness Anomalies under Serializable Isolation
- Overview of Consistency Levels in Database Systems
- The dangers of conditional consistency guarantees
- An explanation of the difference between Isolation levels vs. Consistency levels