Consistency for Region Updates

This topic links to documentation about consistency for region updates in VMware Tanzu GemFire.

Tanzu GemFire ensures that all copies of a region eventually reach a consistent state on all members and clients that host the region, including Tanzu GemFire members that distribute region events.

• Consistency Checking by Region Type

  Tanzu GemFire performs different consistency checks depending on the type of region you have configured.

• Configuring Consistency Checking

  Tanzu GemFire enables consistency checking by default. You cannot deactivate consistency checking for persistent regions. For all other regions, you can explicitly activat or deactivate consistency checking by setting the concurrency-checks-enabled region attribute in cache.xml to true or false.

• Overhead for Consistency Checks

  Consistency checking requires additional overhead for storing and distributing version and timestamp information, as well as for maintaining destroyed entries for a period of time to meet consistency requirements.

• How Consistency Checking Works for Replicated Regions

  Each region stores version and timestamp information for use in conflict detection. Tanzu GemFire members use the recorded information to detect and resolve conflicts consistently before applying a distributed update.

• How Destroy and Clear Operations Are Resolved

  When consistency checking is enabled for a region, a Tanzu GemFire member does not immediately remove an entry from the region when an application destroys the entry. Instead, the member retains the entry with its current version stamp for a period of time in order to detect possible conflicts with operations that have occurred. The retained entry is referred to as a tombstone. Tanzu GemFire retains tombstones for partitioned regions and non-replicated regions as well as for replicated regions, in order to provide consistency.

• Transactions with Consistent Regions

  A transaction that modifies a region having consistency checking enabled generates all necessary version information for region updates when the transaction commits.