Intermediate consistency levels for database configuration

US10970269B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC · US

Inventors

• Karthik Raman · Sammamish, US
• Arsalan Ahmad · Aachen, DE
• Momin M. Al-Ghosien · Sammamish, US
• Mohammad Derakhshani · Duvall, US
• Madhan Gajendran · Bengaluru, IN
• Ji Huang · Beijing, CN
• Kiran Kumar Kolli · Redmond, US
• Sujit Vattathil Kuruvilla · Redmond, US
• Liang Li · Travilah, US
• Denis Rystsov · San Francisco, US
• Pankaj Sharma · New Delhi, IN
• Dharma Shukla · Bellevue, US
• Hari Sundar · Redmond, US
• Shireesh Kumar Thota · Issaquah, US
• Swarnim Vyas · Redmond, US

Key dates

• Filing date: May 29, 2018
• Grant date: Apr 6, 2021
• Expiry date: Jul 14, 2038

Classification

• Technology area (CPC H): Electricity
• CPC primary: H04L67/1029
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

Data services are often provided with consistency guarantees of either strong consistency models, comprising uniform wall-clock consistency, or eventual consistency models, where temporary logical inconsistency is guaranteed to be resolved only after full data propagation. However, the performance characteristics of contemporary services often require an intermediate consistency model, where some aspects of the service have specific consistency expectations and other aspects of the service are flexible, such as bounded staleness (e.g., a maximum delay in reaching consistency); session consistency (e.g., individual sessions remain logically consistent, but ordering may vary across sessions); and prefix consistency (e.g., each view during a session is logically consistent, but ordering may vary between session views). Service guarantees may involve a selection within a range of consistency models that includes one or more intermediate consistency levels, and server configurations may be selected and applied to fulfill the intermediate consistency level selected in the service level agreement.