Data Consistency Properties and the Trade-offs in Commercial Cloud Storages: the Consumers' Perspective

TLDR

NoSQL data storage systems have emerged, rejecting general ACID transactions and offering a spectrum of consistency guarantees from eventual to single‑entity ACID, with weaker consistency enabling higher availability and lower latency. This study examines consumers’ observations of consistency and performance across different NoSQL offerings. The authors find that many platforms deliver stronger consistency than advertised, and that offering a choice between stronger and weaker consistency does not yield observable benefits for consumers.

Abstract

A new class of data storage systems, called NoSQL (Not Only SQL), have emerged to complement traditional database systems, with rejection of general ACID transactions as one common feature. Different platforms, and indeed different primitives within one NoSQL platform, can offer various consistency properties, from Eventual Consistency to single-entity ACID. For the platform provider, weaker consistency should allow better availability, lower latency, and other benefits. This paper investigates what consumers observe of the consistency and performance properties of various offerings. We find that many platforms seem in practice to offer more consistency than they promise; we also find cases where the platform offers consumers a choice between stronger and weaker consistency, but there is no observed benefit from accepting weaker consistency properties.