Towards Adaptive Transactional Consistency for Georeplicated Datastores

Abstract

Developers of data-intensive georeplicated applications face a difficult decision when selecting a database system. As captured by the CAP theorem, CP systems such as Spanner provide strong consistency that greatly simplifies application development. AP systems such as AntidoteDB providing Transactional Causal Consistency (TCC), ensure availability in face of network partitions and isolate performance from wide-area round-trip times, but avoid lost-update anomalies only when values can be merged. Ideally, an application should be able to adapt to current data and network conditions by selecting which transactional consistency to use for each transaction. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that a georeplicated database system can be built at its core providing only TCC, hence, being AP, but allow an application to execute some transactions under Snapshot Isolation (SI), hence CP. Our main result is showing that this can be achieved even when all the interaction happens through the TCC database system, without additional communication channels between the participants. A preliminary experimental evaluation with a proof-of-concept implementation using AntidoteDB shows that this approach is feasible. Copyright © 2025 held by the owner/author(s).