Arjun on "A Critique of Snapshot Isolation"

Paper Title: A Critique of Snapshot Isolation
Paper Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18393
Content:
"A Critique of Snapshot Isolation" is a notable transaction paper implemented in CockroachDB and Badger. It analyzes snapshot isolation (SI) and highlights that while SI offers high concurrency by checking only for write-write conflicts, it fails to guarantee serializability, allowing anomalies like write skew. The authors introduce write-snapshot isolation (WSI), an alternative that ensures serializability by preventing read-write conflicts rather than write-write conflicts. The paper demonstrates that WSI can achieve performance comparable to SI while providing the stricter consistency guarantees of serializability, making it a more robust solution for transactional support in large-scale distributed databases.