Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
We prove that transactions cannot be fast in an asynchronous fault-tolerant system. Our result holds in any system where we require transactions to ensure monotonic writes, or any stronger consistency model, such as, causal consistency. Thus, our result unveils an important, and so far unknown, limitation of fast transactions: they are impossible if we want to tolerate the failure of even one server.