The CISE tool: proving weakly-consistent applications correct

Abstract

Designers of a replicated database face a vexing choice between strong consistency, which ensures certain application invariants but is slow and fragile, and asynchronous replication, which is highly available and responsive, but exposes the programmer to unfamiliar behaviours. To bypass this conundrum, recent research has studied hybrid consistency models, in which updates are asynchronous by default, but synchronisation is available upon request. To help programmers exploit hybrid consistency, we propose the first static analysis tool for proving integrity invariants of applications using databases with hybrid consistency models. This allows a programmer to find minimal consistency guarantees sufficient for application correctness.