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Concept
Causal consistency
Summary
Causal consistency is one of the major memory consistency models. In concurrent programming, where concurrent processes are accessing a shared memory, a consistency model restricts which accesses are legal. This is useful for defining correct data structures in distributed shared memory or distributed transactions.
Causal Consistency is “Available under Partition”, meaning that a process can read and write the memory (memory is Available) even while there is no functioning network connection (network is Partitioned) between processes; it is an asynchronous model. Contrast to strong consistency models, such as sequential consistency or linearizability, which cannot be both safe and live under partition, and are slow to respond because they require synchronisation.
Causal consistency was proposed in 1990s as a weaker consistency model for shared memory models. Causal consistency is closely related to the concept of Causal Broadcast in communication protocols. In these models, a distributed execution is represented as a partial order, based on Lamport's happened-before concept of potential causality.
Causal consistency is a useful consistency model because it matches programmers' intuitions about time, is more available than strong consistency models, yet provides more useful guarantees than eventual consistency. For instance, in distributed databases, causal consistency supports the ordering of operations, in contrast to eventual consistency. Also, causal consistency helps with the development of abstract data types such as queues or counters.
Since time and ordering are so fundamental to our intuition, it is hard
to reason about a system that does not enforce causal consistency.
However, many distributed databases lack this guarantee, even ones that
provide serialisability.
Spanner does guarantee causal consistency, but it also forces strong consistency, thus eschewing availability under partition.
More available databases that ensure causal consistency include MongoDB
and AntidoteDB.
Official source
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