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Large-scale distributed systems as used in global applications such as Facebook or Gmail often rely on replicated databases that allow a programmer to request different data consistency guarantees for different operations. Using such databases is far from trivial: requesting stronger consistency in too many places may hurt performance, and requesting it in too few places may violate correctness.

To help programmers in this task, Carla Ferreira, NOVA LINCS researcher from the Software Systems Group, Alexey Gotsman (IMDEA Software), Hongseok Yang (University of Oxford), Mahsa Najafzadeh (INRIA) and Marc Shapiro (INRIA) propose the first proof rule for establishing that a particular choice of consistency guarantees for operations on a replicated database is enough to ensure a given data integrity invariant. This work was presented at POPL 2016.

POPL (the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages), established 1973, is the very top world leading conference on its field, and extremely selective venue.

This work was developed within the SyncFree Project coordinated by Nuno Preguiça, PI of the Computer Systems Group.

Alexey Gotsman, Hongseok Yang, Carla Ferreira, Mahsa Najafzadeh, and Marc Shapiro. 2016. ‘Cause I’m strong enough: reasoning about consistency choices in distributed systems. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2016).