Title: Comparison of consistency approaches for cloud databases

Authors: Md. Ashfakul Islam; Susan V. Vrbsky

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0290, USA ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0290, USA

Abstract: In the last few years, cloud computing has emerged as an exciting and successful paradigm for large-scale computing. Data sizes are increasing exponentially everyday, which makes data management applications potential candidates for deployment in a cloud. The maintenance of ACID properties is the primary obstacle to the implementation of transactional data management systems in a cloud. In particular, the distributed nature of a cloud platform is one of the main challenges of consistency maintenance. In this paper, we study three different techniques for maintaining consistency: the classic approach, the quorum approach and our tree-based consistency (TBC) approach. We identify the key controlling parameters of consistency maintenance in cloud databases and study the behaviour of the different techniques with respect to those parameters. Results demonstrate the advantages and weaknesses of the three consistency techniques.

Keywords: cloud computing; ACID properties; cloud databases; interdependency; tree-based consistency; TBC; quorum strategy; performance factors; transactional databases; reliability; availability; replication; data management; consistency maintenance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2013.058099

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2013 Vol.2 No.4, pp.378 - 398

Received: 21 May 2012
Accepted: 05 Sep 2012
Published online: 28 Feb 2014 *

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