Re: Major features for 9.1

Andrew Lardinois  wrote:

> I'm starting research on 'innovation' in database technologies. To
> be sure I'm on the right track, this thread is about serializable
> architecture, or, transaction locking.

This thread has wandered into a discussion about innovative features
of the upcoming 9,1 release of PostgreSQL, of which there are
several.

> when it comes to SSI I am not finding any explanations
> for this acronym.

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Serializable

It's about a technique for serializable transactions which doesn't
add any blocking beyond what is present in snapshot isolation.  In
contrast, most serializable implementations which provide true
serializability do this by blocking conflicting transactions.  A
description of the SSI technique was first published in the 2008 ACM
SIGMOD, with independent confirmation of some of the published
performance improvements compared to traditional S2PL serializability
by an ACM committee.  While two prototype implementations were
developed to support academic papers on the topic, we believe this is
the first production-quality implementation.  It includes many
innovations which were not described in any academic papers on the
topic.

-Kevin