The CAT theorem and performance of transactional distributed systems

Abstract

We argue that transactional distributed database/storage systems need to view the impossibility theorem in terms of the contention, abort rate, and throughput, rather than via the traditional CAP theorem. Motivated by Jim Gray, we state a new impossibility theorem, which we call the CAT theorem (Contention-Abort-Throughput). We present experimental results from the performance of several transactional systems w.r.t. the CAT impossibility spectrum.