It's time to pick up our series on consistency and replication again. See consistency tag for the previous paper reviews on the topic.

I had thought I could live a happy life as a database engineer, and eventually retire, without ever having to actually read any literature on Paxos.

Mark Callaghan pointed me to a paper for my comments: Strong and Efficient Consistency with Consistency-Aware Durability by Ganesan, Alagappan and Arpaci-Dusseau ^2. It won Best Paper award at the Usenix Fast '20 conference. The paper presents a new consistency level for distributed databases where reads are causally consistent with other reads but not (necessarily) with writes.

My comments are mostly on section 2 of the paper, which describes current state of the art and a motivation for their work.