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This paper investigates an interesting and promising research problem: how can we implement distributed transactions more efficiently by performing a cross-layer design of the transaction protocal/layer with the underlying distributed storage protocol/layer? This idea is motivated by the observation that there is wasted/duplicated work done both at the transaction layer and at the storage layer. The transaction layer already provides ordering (i.e., linearizability), and, if you look at the distributed storage layer, it also provides strongly consistent replication which orders/linearizes updates often with Paxos. The paper argues that this is overlapping functionality, and leads to higher latency and lower throughput. Ok, at this point, we have to take a step back and realize that we cannot avoid all coordination between the two layers. The distributed storage layer needs to be consistent with the order of updates at the transaction layer, because it serves reads and you like it to...

I have reviewed many Facebook papers in this blog before (see the links at the bottom for full list). Facebook papers are simple (in the good sense of the word) and interesting due to the huge scale of operation at Facebook. They are testaments of high scalability in practice. This one here is no different. This paper investigates the consistency of the Facebook TAO system. The TAO system is a replicated storage system for Facebook's social graph of billion vertices. In theory, TAO provides only eventual consistency. The interesting result in this paper is this: In practice, Facebook's TAO system is highly consistent, with only 5 inconsistency violations out of a million read requests! Facebook's TAO system TAO is basically 2-level memcached architecture backed by a database, as first discussed in NSDI'13 paper.  TAO architecture is given in Figure 1. As a prerequisite to TAO consistency discussion in the next section, it will be enough to review how TAO serves re...