Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations

Summary: Defines Highly Available Transactions (HATs): transactional guarantees that remain available under partitions without WAN coordination. A unified taxonomy identifies achievable isolation/consistency combinations and quantifies 2–3-order-of-magnitude gains, alongside necessary semantic compromises. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h68f605cef7921df1
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 0.00011581268
Overall Rank: 1,194 | 91.98%
DOI: 10.14778/2732232.2732238
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Peter Bailis (University of California Berkeley)
2. Aaron Davidson (University of California Berkeley)
3. Alan Fekete (University of Sydney)
4. Ali Ghodsi (University of California Berkeley)
5. Joseph M. Hellerstein (University of California Berkeley)
6. Ion Stoica (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@article{bailis_vldb14,
        title = {{Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations}},
        author = {Bailis, Peter and Davidson, Aaron and Fekete, Alan and Ghodsi, Ali and Hellerstein, Joseph M. and Stoica, Ion},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '14},
        volume = {7},
        number = {3},
        pages = {181--192},
        doi = {10.14778/2732232.2732238},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2732232.2732238},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 31 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
63	Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	0.00038521221
808	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013772337
1,281	LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans	2020	VLDB	0.00011218311
1,442	Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service	2020	VLDB	0.00010636513
1,945	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.3239199e-05
1,948	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.3202419e-05
2,080	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD	9.0739379e-05
2,137	A Transactional Perspective on Execute-order-validate Blockchains	2020	SIGMOD	8.986059e-05
3,029	Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna	2019	VLDB	7.7341355e-05
3,200	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.5406953e-05
3,435	Implementation of Cluster-wide Logical Clock and Causal Consistency in MongoDB	2019	SIGMOD	7.2981897e-05
4,364	Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?	2017	CIDR	6.6349342e-05
4,397	Transactional Causal Consistency for Serverless Computing	2020	SIGMOD	6.6133242e-05
5,371	RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook's Online TAO Data Store	2021	VLDB	6.1575541e-05
5,651	Lineage-driven Fault Injection	2015	SIGMOD	6.0495347e-05
5,779	Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion	2021	SIGMOD	5.9953144e-05
6,700	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.7035574e-05
8,887	Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases	2023	VLDB	5.2545859e-05
9,614	TxnSails: Achieving Serializable Transaction Scheduling with Self-Adaptive Isolation Level Selection	2025	VLDB	5.1506861e-05
10,065	Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.0851868e-05
10,141	Deciding Robustness for Lower SQL Isolation Levels	2020	PODS	5.0723744e-05
10,461	Epoch-based Optimistic Concurrency Control in Geo-replicated Databases	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,547	Testing Graph Databases with Synthesized Queries	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,024	Vodka: Rethink Benchmarking Philosophy in HTAP Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,053	Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,299	Using Read Promotion and Mixed Isolation Levels for Performant Yet Serializable Execution of Transaction Programs	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,693	Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions in a Multiversion Setting	2023	PODS	4.9769913e-05
11,841	Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch	2022	PODS	4.9769913e-05
11,961	Efficiently Supporting Adaptive Multi-Level Serializability Models in Distributed Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,190	Performance in the Spotlight	2019	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,385	The Case for Invariant-Based Concurrency Control	2015	CIDR	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
19	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00058759613
47	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.00044047047
55	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040454492
80	H-Store: A High-Performance, Distributed Main Memory Transaction Processing System	2008	VLDB	0.00036354352
381	Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion	2007	CIDR	0.0001948344
647	Building a Database on S3	2008	SIGMOD	0.00015201469
1,248	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011347831
1,695	Bolt-on Causal Consistency	2013	SIGMOD	9.8510025e-05
3,310	Rethinking Eventual Consistency	2013	SIGMOD	7.4373532e-05

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