Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Transactions are fundamental and ubiquitous, a critical foundation for data intensive applications of all kinds: from tiny embedded systems to global, always-on, consumer and enterprise applications. Transactions can be thought of as a contract between applications and the underlying data system that supports them. Applications then rely on this contract to ensure correct operation.Persistence is an important part of the transactional contract. Informally, persistence is a guarantee that failures will not erase database changes that have been committed by an application's transactions. The persistence contract has changed little since transactions were first formalized more than 40 years ago. Unfortunately, it has grown increasingly out of step with the realities of modern data systems and applications. This mismatch causes real problems for applications, which must fall back to ad hoc techniques that destroy many of the advantages that the transactional contract ought to provide.I propose to develop a new breed of transactional data systems that can solve the persistence problem. Since the root of the problem is the persistence contract itself, an important contribution of this work will be a new, flexible persistence contract. The new contract will allow applications to directly manage a tradeoff between performance and the risk of data loss, without resorting to current ad hoc techniques. I will demonstrate that this new persistence contract can be used as a foundation for building better applications and data systems in a wide variety of settings.