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On Eventual Consistency– Interview with Monty Widenius.

by Roberto V. Zicari on October 23, 2012

“For analytical things, eventual consistency is ok (as long as you can know after you have run them if they were consistent or not). For real world involving money or resources it’s not necessarily the case.” — Michael “Monty” Widenius.

In a recent interview, I asked Justin Sheehy, Chief Technology Officer at Basho Technologies, maker of Riak, the following two questions, related to the subject of eventual consistency:

Q1. “How do you handle updates if you do not support ACID transactions? For which applications this is sufficient, and when this is not?”

Q2. “You said that Riak takes more of the “BASE” (Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency) approach. Did you use the definition of eventual consistency by Werner Vogels? Reproduced here: “Eventual consistency: The storage system guarantees that if no new updates are made to the object, eventually (after the inconsistency window closes) all accesses will return the last updated value.”
You would not wish to have an “eventual consistency” update to your bank account. For which class of applications is eventual consistency a good system design choice? “

On the same subject, I did a follow up interview with Michael “Monty” Widenius, the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database, and currently working on a branch of the MySQL code base, called MariaDB.

RVZ

Q. Justin Sheehy`s reply to Q1: “Riak takes more of the “BASE” approach, which has become accepted over the past several years as a sensible tradeoff for high-availability data systems. By allowing consistency guarantees to be a bit flexible during failure conditions, a Riak cluster is able to provide much more extreme availability guarantees than a strictly ACID system.”
When do you think a “BASE” approach to consistency is justified?

“Monty” Widenius: The big questions are:
a) How are conflict’s solved? Who will win when there are conflicting updates on two nodes and the communication between the nodes are temporarily down?
b) Can a user at any point read data that is not consistent?
c) How long can the conflicting window be?

The answers to the above questions tells us how suitable the solution is for different applications. For analytical things, eventual consistency is ok (as long as you can know after you have run them if they were consistent or not). For real world involving money or resources it’s not necessarily the case.

Q. How do you handle consistency in MariaDB and at the same time ensuring scalability and availability? Aren’t you experiencing the limitations of the CAP Theorem?

“Monty” Widenius: We are using the traditional approaches with transactions or synchronous replication when you need guaranteed consistent answers.

We also provide asynchronous updates to slaves when you can tolerate a log for the data on the slaves. However, as we are only making things visible when the total transaction is run on either master/slave you have always things consistent.

So when it comes to CAP, it’s up the user to define where he wants to have his tradeoff; Speed, reliability or easy to manage.

Q. Justin Sheehy`s reply to Q2: “That definition of Eventual Consistency certainly does apply to Riak, yes. I would most certainly include updates to my bank account as applications for which eventual consistency is a good design choice. In fact, bankers have understood and used eventual consistency for far longer than there have been computers in the modern sense. Traditional accounting is done in an eventually-consistent way and if you send me a payment from your bank to mine then that transaction will be resolved in an eventually consistent way. That is, your bank account and mine will not have a jointly-atomic change in value, but instead yours will have a debit and mine will have a credit, each of which will be applied to our respective accounts.”

“Monty” Widenius: The question is time spent between the consistency and where things will be inconsistent. For example, at no point in time should there be more money on my account than I have the right to use.
The reason why banks in the past have been using eventual consistency is that the computer systems on the banks simply has not kept up with the rest of the word.
In many places there is still human interaction needed to get money on the account! (especially for larger amounts).
Still, if you ask any bank, they would prefer to have things always consistent if they could!

Q. Justin says that “this question contains a very commonly held misconception. The use of eventual consistency in well-designed systems does not lead to inconsistency. Instead, such systems may allow brief (but shortly resolved) discrepancies at precisely the moments when the other alternative would be to simply fail”.

“Monty” Widenius: In some cases it’s better to fail. For example it’s common that ATM will not give out money when the line to the bank account is down. Giving out money is probably always the wrong choice. The other question is if things are 100 % guaranteed to be consistent down to the millisecond during normal operations.

Q. Justin says: “to rephrase your statement, you would not wish your bank to fail to accept a deposit due to an insistence on strict global consistency.”

“Monty” Widenius: Actually you would, if you can’t verify the identity of the user. Certainly the end user would not want to have the deposit be accepted if there is only a record in a single place of the deposit.

Q. Justin says: ”It is precisely the cases where you care about very high availability of a distributed system that eventual consistencymight be a worthwhile tradeoff.”
What is your take on this? Is Eventual Consistency a valid approach also for traditional banking applications?

“Monty” Widenius: That is what banks have traditionally used. However, if they would have a choice between eventual consistency and always consistent they would always choose the later if it would be possible within their resources.

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Michael “Monty” Widenius is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company. Since 2009, Monty is working on a branch of the MySQL code base, called MariaDB.

Related Posts

On Eventual Consistency– An interview with Justin Sheehy. by Roberto V. Zicari, August 15, 2012

MariaDB: the new MySQL? Interview with Michael Monty Widenius. by Roberto V. Zicari on September 29, 2011

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2 Comments Leave one →
  1. It really depends on the use case.

    For example you want strong consistency for these:
    – new user registration, “pick your username”. you don’t want two users to end up with “joe123” username ever.

    Eventual consistency use case:
    – logging. i want the log even if not immediately readable and i may not want to fail just because of logging.

    The other nuance with eventual consistency is the developer must keep the semantics in mind at all times. In QA you may not see any lag manifest so be sure to test the non-immediate case in QA when going that route.

  2. Jonathan Gennick permalink

    Monty’s comment about not handing out money when communications are down caught my eye. Believe it or not, once my local bank just handed out money. I live in a very small town. People tend to know each other. Shortly after moving here from a large city, I walked into my bank to withdraw some pocket money. I wanted $40, I think, or maybe $60. The teller told me their communications were down, and they couldn’t use their computers. She handed me the cash without making me fill out any forms, without even checking my identification. I’m not even sure she asked my name. (She must have recognized me). She did make a note so she could record the transaction later. I was pretty stunned at the time. Small-town living, I guess. Not sure they would do the same today, but twelve years ago it really happened. And yes, she did remember to record the transaction later.

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