Preparation for Recitation on Consistency

Read the Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball paper.

This paper is relatively light on technical details, but should give you an understanding of different consistency guarantees, and how a system chooses which guarantee to use. Section 2 explains some different guarantees, and Sections 3 and 4 walk through some examples that illustrate places where each guarantee might be used.

Pay close attention to Table 2, which rates each type of guarantee in terms of consistency, performance, and availability. Though the paper doesn't give the technical details that lead to these ratings, you should be able to reason about them based on what you've seen in lecture. After you've finished the paper, you should understand each of the different types of consistency guarantees and how they differ. For instance, in the case of the radio reporter, you should understand why both consistent prefix and monotonic reads are necessary. If you have any questions, please post on Piazza!

As you read, think about the following:

Question for Recitation

Before you come to this recitation, you'll turn in a brief answer to the following questions (really—we don't need more than a sentence or so for each question). Your TA will be in touch about exactly how to turn that in.

Your answers to these questions should be in your own words, not direct quotations from the paper.

As always, there are multiple correct answers for each of these questions.

Notes

Supplemental notes for this recitation. These, along with our Sunday office hours are intended to help students who had to miss a recitation due to isolation, but they're also a useful resource for preparing for exams.