Long-lived Transactions Made Less Harmful

Many systems use snapshot isolation, or something similar, as defaults, and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) remains essential to offering such point-in-time consistency. One major issue in MVCC is the timely removal of unnecessary versions of data items, especially in the presence of long-lived transactions (LLTs). We have observed that the latest versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL are still vulnerable to LLTs. Our analysis of existing proposals suggests that new solutions to this matter must provide rigorous rules for completely identifying unnecessary versions, and elaborate designs for version cleaning lest old versions required for LLTs should suspend garbage collection. In this paper, we formalize such rules into our version pruning theorem and version classification, of which all form theoretical foundations for our new version management system, vDriver, that bases its record versioning on a new principle: Single In-row Remaining Off-row (SIRO) versioning. We implemented a prototype of vDriver and integrated it with MySQL-8.0 and PostgreSQL-12.0. The experimental evaluation demonstrated that the engines with Driver continue to perform the reclamation of dead versions in the face of LLTs while retaining transaction throughput with reduced space consumption.