Semantically Correct and Intent Defined Commutativity in Distributed Systems

This paper reviews the problem of correctness in the context of scaleable distributed systems. It takes the concept of a strongly eventually consistent (SEC) data structure based on the work done on conflict free replicated data types and examines the theoretical basis of a practical application to generalised database management systems. It reasons that the condition required for a database management system to implement a monotonic semilattice and remain generic is not possible. It further proposes a framework which extends the SEC condition to capture enough information to make such a system practical to implement. Finally, it evaluates such an implementation using a modified storage engine for Apache Ignite demonstrating not just its practicality but its scaleability in Ignite and other database management systems like it. The key contributions of this work are Semantic and intent defined conflict free replicated data types, an enriched CRDT which enables generalised database systems to meet the SEC criteria for a monotonic semilattice object and Semantic Intent Configuration Language, SICL, a language and framework for distributed computing.