docs/transaction_semantics.adoc

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[[installation]]
= Transaction Semantics in Apache Kudu

:author: Kudu Team
:imagesdir: ./images
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****
This is a brief introduction to Kudu's transaction and consistency semantics. For an
in-depth technical exposition of most of what is mentioned here, and why it is correct,
see the technical report <<ht>>.
****

Kudu's transactional semantics and architecture are inspired by state-of-the-art
systems such as Spanner <<spanner>> and Calvin <<fdt>>. Kudu builds upon decades of database
research. The core philosophy is to make the lives of developers easier by providing transactions with
simple, strong semantics, without sacrificing performance or the ability to tune to different
requirements.

Kudu is designed to eventually be fully ACID, however, multi-tablet transactions are not
yet implemented. As such, this discussion focuses on single-tablet write operations, and only
briefly touches multi-tablet reads. Eventually Kudu will support fully strict-serializable
semantics. In fact it already does in a limited context, but not all corner cases are covered
as this is still a work in progress.

Kudu currently allows the following operations:

* *Write operations* are sets of rows to be inserted, updated, or deleted in the storage
engine, in a single tablet with multiple replicas. Write operations do not have separate
"read sets" i.e. they do not scan existing data before performing the write. Each write
is only concerned with previous state of the rows that are about to change.
Writes are not  "committed" explicitly by the user. Instead, they are committed automatically
by the system, after completion.

* *Scans* are read operations that can traverse multiple tablets and read information
with different levels of consistency or correctness guarantees. Scans can perform
time-travel reads, i.e. the user is able to set a scan timestamp in the past and
get back results that reflect the state of the storage engine at that point in time.

[NOTE]
.Before We Begin
====
* The term _timestamp_ is mentioned several times to illustrate the
functionality, but _timestamp_ is an internal concept mostly invisible to users,
except when setting timestamp on a `KuduScanner`.

* We generally refer to methods and classes of the {cpp} client. While the Java
client mostly has analogous methods and classes, the exact names of the APIs
may differ.
====

== Single tablet write operations

Kudu employs _Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC)_ and the _Raft consensus_
algorithm <<consensus>>. Each write operation in Kudu must go through the
tablet's leader.

. The leader acquires all locks for the rows that it will change.
. The leader assigns the write a timestamp before the write is submitted for
replication. This timestamp will be the write's "tag" in MVCC.
. After a majority of replicas acknowledges the change, the actual rows are changed.
. After the changes are complete, they are made visible to concurrent writes
and reads, atomically.

All replicas of a tablet observe the same order of operations, and if a write
operation is assigned timestamp _n_ and changes row _x_, a second write operation
at timestamp _m > n_ is guaranteed to see the new value of _x_.

This strict ordering of lock acquisition and timestamp assignment is enforced to be
consistent across all replicas of a tablet through consensus. Therefore, write operations
are totally ordered with regard to clock-assigned timestamps, relative to other writes
in the same tablet. In other words, writes have strict-serializable semantics,
though in an admittedly limited context. See this
link:http://www.bailis.org/blog/linearizability-versus-serializability[blog post]
for a little more context regarding what these semantics mean.

While Isolated and Durable in an ACID sense, multi-row write operations are not yet fully Atomic.
The failure of a single write in a batch operation does not roll back the operation,
but produces per-row errors.

== Writing to multiple tablets

Kudu does not yet support transactions that span multiple tablets. However,
consistent snapshot reads are possible (with caveats in the current implementation)
as explained below.

Writes from a Kudu client are optionally buffered in memory until they are flushed and sent
to the server. When client's session flushes, the rows for each tablet are batched
together, and sent to the tablet server which hosts the leader replica of the tablet.
Since there are no inter-tablet transactions, each of these batches represents a single,
independent write operation with its own timestamp. However, the client API provides
the option to impose some constraints on the assigned timestamps and on how writes to
different tablets can be observed by clients.

Kudu, like Spanner, was designed to be externally consistent <<consistency>>, preserving consistency
when operations span multiple tablets and even multiple data centers. In practice this
means that, if a write operation changes item _x_ at tablet _A_, and a following write
operation changes item _y_ at tablet _B_, you might want to enforce that if
the change to _y_ is observed, the change to _x_ must also be observed. There
are many examples where this can be important. For example,  if Kudu is
storing clickstreams for further analysis, and two clicks follow each other but
are stored in different tablets, subsequent clicks should be assigned subsequent
timestamps so that the causal relationship between them is captured.

.`CLIENT_PROPAGATED` Consistency
Kudu's default external consistency mode is called `CLIENT_PROPAGATED`.
See <<ht>> for an extensive explanation on how it works. In brief, this mode causes writes
from _a single client_ to be automatically externally consistent. In the clickstream scenario
above, if the two clicks are submitted by different client instances, the application must
manually propagate timestamps from one client to the other for the causal relationship
to be captured.

Timestamps between clients _a_ and _b_ can be propagated as follows:

Java Client:: Call `AsyncKuduClient#getLastPropagatedTimestamp()` on client _a_,
propagate the timestamp to client _b_, and call
`AsyncKuduClient#setLastPropagatedTimestamp()` on client _b_.

{cpp} Client:: Call `KuduClient::GetLatestObservedTimestamp()` on client _a_,
propagate the timestamp to client _b_, and call
`KuduClient::SetLatestObservedTimestamp()` on client _b_.



.`COMMIT_WAIT` Consistency
Kudu also has an experimental implementation of an external consistency
model used in Google's Spanner , called `COMMIT_WAIT`. `COMMIT_WAIT` works
by tightly synchronizing the clocks on all machines in the cluster. Then, when a
write occurs, timestamps are assigned and the results of the write are not made
visible until enough time has passed so that no other machine in the cluster could
possibly assign a lower timestamp to a following write.

When using this mode, the latency of writes is tightly tied to the accuracy of clocks on
all the cluster hosts, and using this mode with loose clock synchronization causes writes
to take a long time to complete or even time out. See <<known_issues>>.

The `COMMIT_WAIT` consistency mode may be selected as follows:

Java Client:: Call `KuduSession#setExternalConsistencyMode(ExternalConsistencyMode.COMMIT_WAIT)`

{cpp} Client:: Call `KuduSession::SetExternalConsistencyMode(COMMIT_WAIT)`

CAUTION: `COMMIT_WAIT` consistency is considered an experimental feature. It may return
incorrect results, exhibit performance issues, or negatively impact cluster stability.
Use in production environments is discouraged.

== Read Operations (Scans)

Scans are read operations performed by clients that may span one or more rows across
one or more tablets. When a server receives a scan request, it takes a snapshot of the MVCC
state and then proceeds in one of two ways depending on the read mode selected by
the user. The mode may be selected as follows:

Java Client:: Call `KuduScannerBuilder#readMode(...)`
{cpp} Client:: Call `KuduScanner::SetReadMode()`

The following modes are available in both clients:

`READ_LATEST`:: This is the default read mode. The server takes a snapshot of
the MVCC state and proceeds with the read immediately. Reads in this mode only yield
'Read Committed' isolation.

`READ_AT_SNAPSHOT`:: In this read mode, scans are consistent and repeatable. A
timestamp for the snapshot is selected either by the server, or set
explicitly by the user through `KuduScanner::SetSnapshotMicros()`. Explicitly setting
the timestamp is recommended; see <<recommendations>>. The server waits until this
timestamp is 'safe' (until all write operations that have a lower timestamp have
completed and are visible). This delay, coupled with an external consistency method,
will eventually allow Kudu to have full `strict-serializable` semantics for reads
and writes. This is still a work in progress and some anomalies are still possible
(see <<known_issues>>). Only scans in this mode can be fault-tolerant.

Selecting between read modes requires balancing the trade-offs and making a choice
that fits your workload. For instance, a reporting application that needs to
scan the entire database might need to perform careful accounting operations, so that
scan may need to be fault-tolerant, but probably doesn't require a to-the-microsecond
up-to-date view of the database. In that case, you might choose `READ_AT_SNAPSHOT`
and select a timestamp that is a few seconds in the past when the scan starts. On
the other hand, a machine learning workload that is not ingesting the whole data
set and is already statistical in nature might not require the scan to be repeatable,
so you might choose `READ_LATEST` instead for better scan performance.

[NOTE]
====
Kudu also provides replica selection API for users to choose at which replica the
scan should be performed:

Java Client:: Call `KuduScannerBuilder#replicaSelection(...)`
{cpp} Client:: Call `KuduScanner::SetSelection(...)`

This API is a means to control locality and, in some cases, latency. The replica
selection API has no effect on the consistency guarantees, which will hold no matter
which replica is selected.
====

[[known_issues]]
== Known Issues and Limitations

There are several gaps and corner cases that prevent Kudu from being fully strictly-serializable
in some situations, at the moment. Below are the details and next, some recommendations.

[[known_issues_scans]]
=== Writes

* Support for `COMMIT_WAIT` is experimental and requires careful tuning of the
  time-synchronization protocol, such as NTP (Network Time Protocol). Its use
  is discouraged in production environments.

=== Reads (Scans)

* On a leader change, `READ_AT_SNAPSHOT` scans at a snapshot whose timestamp is beyond the last
  write may also yield non-repeatable reads (see
  link:https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KUDU-1188[KUDU-1188]).
  See <<recommendations>> for a workaround.
* Impala scans are currently performed as `READ_LATEST` and have no consistency
  guarantees.
* In `AUTO_BACKGROUND_FLUSH` mode, or when using "async" flushing mechanisms,
  writes applied to a single client session may become reordered due to the
  concurrency of flushing the data to the server. This may be particularly
  noticeable if a single row is quickly updated with different values in
  succession. This phenomenon affects all client API implementations.
  Workarounds are described in the API documentation for the respective
  implementations in the docs for `FlushMode` or `AsyncKuduSession`.
  See link:https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KUDU-1767[KUDU-1767].

[[recommendations]]
=== Recommendations

* If repeatable snapshot reads are a requirement, use `READ_AT_SNAPSHOT`
  with a timestamp that is slightly in the past (between 2-5 seconds, ideally).
  This will circumvent the anomaly described in <<known_issues_scans>>. Even when the
  anomaly has been addressed, back-dating the timestamp will always make scans
  faster, since they are unlikely to block.

* If external consistency is a requirement and you decide to use `COMMIT_WAIT`, the
  time-synchronization protocol needs to be tuned carefully. Each transaction will wait
  2x the maximum clock error at the time of execution, which is usually in the 100 msec.
  to 1 sec. range with the default settings, maybe more. Thus, transactions would take at least
  200 msec. to 2 sec. to complete when using the default settings and may even time out.

  ** A local server should be used as a time server. We've performed experiments using the default
  NTP time source available in a Google Compute Engine data center and were able to obtain
  a reasonable tight max error bound, usually varying between 12-17 milliseconds.

  ** The following parameters should be adjusted in `/etc/ntp.conf` to tighten the maximum error:
  - `server my_server.org iburst minpoll 1 maxpoll 8`
  - `tinker dispersion 500`
  - `tinker allan 0`

IMPORTANT: The above parameters minimize `maximum error` at the expense of `estimated error`,
the latter might be orders of magnitude above it's "normal" value. These parameters also
may place a greater load on the time server, since they make the servers poll much more
frequently.

[bibliography]
== References
- [[[ht,1]]] David Alves, Todd Lipcon and Vijay Garg. Technical Report: HybridTime - Accessible Global Consistency with High Clock Uncertainty. April, 2014. http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~garg/pdslab/david/hybrid-time-tech-report-01.pdf
- [[[spanner,2]]] James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, J. J. Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, and Dale Woodford. 2012. Spanner: Google's globally-distributed database. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'12). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 251-264.
- [[[fdt,3]]] Alexander Thomson, Thaddeus Diamond, Shu-Chun Weng, Kun Ren, Philip Shao, and Daniel J. Abadi. 2012. Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-12. DOI=10.1145/2213836.2213838 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2213836.2213838
- [[[consensus,4]]] Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. 2014. In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. In Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC'14), Garth Gibson and Nickolai Zeldovich (Eds.). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 305-320.
- [[[consistency,5]]] Kwei-Jay Lin, "Consistency issues in real-time database systems," in System Sciences, 1989. Vol.II: Software Track, Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Hawaii International Conference on , vol.2, no., pp.654-661 vol.2, 3-6 Jan 1989 doi: 10.1109/HICSS.1989.48069