Current distributed key-value stores generally provide greater scalability at the expense of weaker consistency and isolation. However, additional isolation support is becoming increasingly important in the environments in which these stores are deployed, where different kinds of applications with different needs are executed, from transactional workloads to data analytics. While fully-fledged ACID support may not be feasible, it is still possible to take advantage of the design of these data stores, which often include the notion of multiversion concurrency control, to enable them with additional features at a much lower performance cost and maintaining its scalability and availability. In this paper we explore the effects that additional consistency guarantees and isolation capabilities may have on a state of the art key-value store: Apache Cassandra. We propose and implement a new multiversioned isolation level that provides stronger guarantees without compromising Cassandra's scalability and availability. As shown in our experiments, our version of Cassandra allows Snapshot Isolation-like transactions, preserving the overall performance and scalability of the system.

This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain and the European Union’s FEDER funds (TIN2007-60625, TIN2012-34557), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009-SGR-980), by the BSC-CNS Severo Ochoa program (SEV-2011-00067), by the HiPEAC European Network of Excellence (IST- 004408, FP7-ICT-217068, FP7-ICT-287759), and by IBM through the 2008 and 2010 IBM Faculty Award program.

Peer Reviewed