[CASSANDRA-11000] Mixing LWT and non-LWT operations can result in an LWT operation being acknowledged but not applied

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Component/s: Legacy/Coordination

Environment

Cassandra 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0 on Linux and OS X.

• Severity: Normal
• Since Version: 2.1.11
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Sebastian Marsching
• Created: 11/Jan/16 21:59
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:30
• Resolved: 01/Jun/16 09:25

Description

When mixing light-weight transaction (LWT, a.k.a. compare-and-set, conditional update) operations with regular operations, it can happen that an LWT operation is acknowledged (applied = True), even though the update has not been applied and a SELECT operation still returns the old data.

For example, consider the following table:

CREATE TABLE test (
    pk text,
    ck text,
    v text,
    PRIMARY KEY (pk, ck)
);

We start with an empty table and insert data using a regular (non-LWT) operation:

INSERT INTO test (pk, ck, v) VALUES ('foo', 'bar', '123');

A following SELECT statement returns the data as expected. Now we do a conditional update (LWT):

UPDATE test SET v = '456' WHERE pk = 'foo' AND ck = 'bar' IF v = '123';

As expected, the update is applied and a following SELECT statement shows the updated value.

Now we do the same but use a time stamp that is slightly in the future (e.g. a few seconds) for the INSERT statement (obviously $time$ needs to be replaced by a time stamp that is slightly ahead of the system clock).

INSERT INTO test (pk, ck, v) VALUES ('foo', 'bar', '123') USING TIMESTAMP $time$;

Now, running the same UPDATE statement still report success (applied = True). However, a subsequent SELECT yields the old value ('123') instead of the updated value ('456'). Inspecting the time stamp of the value indicates that it has not been replaced (the value from the original INSERT is still in place).

This behavior is exhibited in an single-node cluster running Cassandra 2.1.11, 2.2.4, and 3.0.1.

Testing this for a multi-node cluster is a bit more tricky, so I only tested it with Cassandra 2.2.4. Here, I made one of the nodes lack behind in time for a few seconds (using libfaketime). I used a replication factor of three for the test keyspace. In this case, the behavior can be demonstrated even without using an explicitly specified time stamp. Running

INSERT INTO test (pk, ck, v) VALUES ('foo', 'bar', '123');

on a node with the regular clock followed by

UPDATE test SET v = '456' WHERE pk = 'foo' AND ck = 'bar' IF v = '123';

on the node lagging behind results in the UPDATE to report success, but the old value still being used.

Interestingly, everything works as expected if using LWT operations consistently: When running

UPDATE test SET v = '456' WHERE pk = 'foo' AND ck = 'bar' IF v = '123';
UPDATE test SET v = '123' WHERE pk = 'foo' AND ck = 'bar' IF v = '456';

in an alternating fashion on two nodes (one with a "normal" clock, one with the clock lagging behind), the updates are applied as expected. When checking the time stamps ("SELECT WRITETIME(v) FROM test;"), one can see that the time stamp is increased by just a single tick when the statement is executed on the node lagging behind.

I think that this problem is strongly related to (or maybe even the same as) the one described in CASSANDRA-7801, even though CASSANDRA-7801 was mainly concerned about a single-node cluster. However, the fact that this problem still exists in current versions of Cassandra makes me suspect that either it is a different problem or the original problem was not fixed completely with the patch from CASSANDRA-7801.

I found CASSANDRA-9655 which suggest removing the changes introduced with CASSANDRA-7801 because they can be problematic under certain circumstances, but I am not sure whether this is the right place to discuss the issue I am experiencing. If you feel so, feel free to close this issue and update the description of CASSANDRA-9655.

In my opinion, the best way to fix this problem would be ensuring that a write that is part of a LWT always uses a time stamp that is at least one tick greater than the time stamp of the existing data. As the existing data has to be read for checking the condition anyway, I do not think that this would cause an additional overhead. If this is not possible, I suggest to look into whether we can somehow detect such a situation and at least report failure (applied = False) on the LWT instead of reporting success.

The latter solution would at least fix those cases where code checks the success of a LWT before performing any further actions (e.g. because the LWT is used to take some kind of lock). Currently, the code will assume that the operation was successful (and thus - staying in the example - it owns the lock), while other processes running in parallel will see a different state. It is my understanding that LWTs were designed to avoid exactly this situation, but at the moment the assumptions most users will make about LWTs do not always hold.

Until this issue is solved, I suggest at least updating the CQL documentation and clearly stating that LWTs / conditional updates are not safe if data has been previously INSERTed / UPDATEd / DELETEd using non-LWT operations and there is a clock skew or time stamps that are in the future have been supplied explicitly. This should at least save some users from making wrong assumptions about LWTs and not realizing it until their application fails in an unsafe way.

Issue Links

• is related to: CASSANDRA-11440 consider LWT staleness warning when reading LWT back below serial consistency