Glossary
Note
Please note that the definitions in this glossary are short and simple, intended to convey the core idea but not the full subtleties of a term. For more detail, please follow the references into the main text.
- asynchronous
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Not waiting for something to complete (e.g., sending data over the network to another node), and not making any assumptions about how long it is going to take. See “Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Replication”, “Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks”, and “System Model and Reality”.
- atomic
-
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In the context of concurrent operations: describing an operation that appears to take effect at a single point in time, so another concurrent process can never encounter the operation in a “half-finished” state. See also isolation.
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In the context of transactions: grouping together a set of writes that must either all be committed or all be rolled back, even if faults occur. See “Atomicity” and “Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)”.
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- backpressure
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Forcing the sender of some data to slow down when the recipient cannot keep up with it. Also known as flow control. See “Messaging Systems”.
- batch process
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A computation that takes some fixed (and usually large) set of data as input and produces some other data as output, without modifying the input. See Chapter 10.
- bounded
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Having some known upper limit or size. Used for example in the context of network delay (see “Timeouts and Unbounded Delays”) and datasets (see the introduction to
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