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: 0.00011555425
Overall Rank: 1,192 | 92.02%
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	0.00038609177
807	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00013734149
1,287	LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans	2020	VLDB	0.00011181449
1,448	Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service	2020	VLDB	0.00010601724
1,885	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.4209865e-05
1,952	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.2989778e-05
2,090	ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications	2017	SIGMOD	9.0448846e-05
2,146	A Transactional Perspective on Execute-order-validate Blockchains	2020	SIGMOD	8.9604977e-05
3,037	Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna	2019	VLDB	7.7086155e-05
3,208	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.5187209e-05
3,448	Implementation of Cluster-wide Logical Clock and Causal Consistency in MongoDB	2019	SIGMOD	7.2745918e-05
4,387	Latch-free Synchronization in Database Systems: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?	2017	CIDR	6.6129973e-05
4,417	Transactional Causal Consistency for Serverless Computing	2020	SIGMOD	6.591509e-05
5,389	RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook's Online TAO Data Store	2021	VLDB	6.1371949e-05
5,662	Lineage-driven Fault Injection	2015	SIGMOD	6.0298936e-05
5,785	Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion	2021	SIGMOD	5.9771676e-05
6,714	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.6847011e-05
8,895	Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases	2023	VLDB	5.2412904e-05
9,633	TxnSails: Achieving Serializable Transaction Scheduling with Self-Adaptive Isolation Level Selection	2025	VLDB	5.135655e-05
10,098	Simple Testing Can Expose Most Critical Transaction Bugs: Understanding and Detecting Write-Specific Serializability Violations in Database Systems	2025	VLDB	5.068372e-05
10,178	Deciding Robustness for Lower SQL Isolation Levels	2020	PODS	5.055639e-05
10,527	Epoch-based Optimistic Concurrency Control in Geo-replicated Databases	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,612	Testing Graph Databases with Synthesized Queries	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
11,085	Vodka: Rethink Benchmarking Philosophy in HTAP Systems	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,114	Fast Verification of Strong Database Isolation	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,354	Using Read Promotion and Mixed Isolation Levels for Performant Yet Serializable Execution of Transaction Programs	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,739	Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions in a Multiversion Setting	2023	PODS	4.9605343e-05
11,885	Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch	2022	PODS	4.9605343e-05
12,005	Efficiently Supporting Adaptive Multi-Level Serializability Models in Distributed Database Systems	2021	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,233	Performance in the Spotlight	2019	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,428	The Case for Invariant-Based Concurrency Control	2015	CIDR	4.9605343e-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	0.00058631912
47	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.00043937456
54	Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems	2012	SIGMOD	0.00040489652
80	H-Store: A High-Performance, Distributed Main Memory Transaction Processing System	2008	VLDB	0.00036267455
384	Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion	2007	CIDR	0.00019432779
649	Building a Database on S3	2008	SIGMOD	0.00015156241
1,255	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011313104
1,701	Bolt-on Causal Consistency	2013	SIGMOD	9.8192785e-05
3,300	Rethinking Eventual Consistency	2013	SIGMOD	7.4253314e-05

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