= Glossary
Manik Surtani, Mircea Markus, Galder Zamarreño, Pete Muir, and others from the Infinispan community
:toc2:
:icons: font

TIP: This glossary aims to clarify some of the terms frequently encountered in
Infinispan's link:$$../user_guide/user_guide.html$$[User Guide],
link:$$../getting_started/getting_started.html$$[Getting Started Guide], link:$$../faqs/faqs.html$$[FAQs],
etc.

== 2-phase commit
2-phase commit protocol (2PC) is a consensus protocol used for atomically
commit or rollback distributed transactions.

.More resources
* link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol$$[Wikipedia article] 

== Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID)
According to link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID[Wikipedia], ACID (Atomicity,
Consistency, Isolation, Durability) is a set of properties that guarantee
that database transactions are processed reliably. In the context of databases,
 a single logical operation on the data is called a transaction. For example, a
 transfer of funds from one bank account to another, even involving multiple
changes such as debiting one account and crediting another, is a single
transaction.

.More resources
* link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID[Wikipedia]

== Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventually-consistent (BASE)
BASE, also known as link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency$$[Eventual Consistency],
is seen as the polar opposite of _ACID_, properties seen as desirable in
traditional database systems. 

BASE essentially embraces the fact that true consistency cannot be achieved
in the real world, and as such cannot be modelled in highly scalable
distributed systems.  BASE has roots in Eric Brewer's _CAP Theorem_, and
eventual consistency is the underpinning of any distributed system that aims to
 provide high availability and partition tolerance. 

Infinispan has traditionally followed ACID principles as far as possible,
however an eventually consistent mode embracing BASE is on the roadmap.

.More resources
* A link:$$http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1394128$$[good article] 
on link:$$http://queue.acm.org/index.cfm$$[ACM] compares BASE versus ACID. 
* An link:$$http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Riak-Core$$[excellent talk] on
eventual consistency and BASE in Riak is also available on InfoQ. 

== Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance (CAP) Theorem
Made famous by link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brewer_(computer_scientist)$$[Eric Brewer]
at UC Berkeley, this is a theorem of distributed computing that can be
simplified to state that one can only practically build a distributed system
exhibiting any two of the three desirable characteristics of distributed
systems, which are: Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance
(abbreviated to CAP).  The theorem effectively stresses on the unreliability of
networks and the effect this unreliability has on predictable behavior and high
availability of dependent systems. 

Infinispan has traditionally been biased towards Consistency and Availability,
sacrificing Partition-tolerance.  However, Infinispan does have a
Partition-tolerant, eventually-consistent mode in the pipeline.  This optional
mode of operation will allow users to tune the degree of consistency they
expect from their data, sacrificing partition-tolerance for this added
consistency.

.More resources
* The theorem is well-discussed online, with many good resources to follow up
on, including 
link:$$http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem$$[this document]. 
* A more recent article by Eric Brewer himself appears on InfoQ 
link:$$http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed$$[a modern analysis of the theorem] . 

== Consistent Hash
A technique of mapping keys to servers such that, given a stable cluster
topology, any server in the cluster can locate where a given key is mapped
to with minimal computational complexity.

Consistent hashing is a purely algorithmic technique, and doesn't rely on 
any metadata or any network broadcasts to "search" for a key in a cluster.
This makes it extremely efficient to use.

.More resources

* link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing[Wikipedia]

== Data grid
A data grid is a cluster of (typically commodity) servers, normally residing on
a single local-area network, connected to each other using IP based networking.
Data grids behave as a single resource, exposing the aggregate storage capacity
of all servers in the cluster. Data stored in the grid is usually partitioned,
using a variety of techniques, to balance load across all servers in the cluster
as evenly as possible.  Data is often redundantly stored in the grid to provide
resilience to individual servers in the grid failing i.e. more than one copy is
stored in the grid, transparently to the application.

Data grids typically behave in a peer-to-peer fashion. Infinispan, for example,
makes use of link:http://www.jgroups.org[JGroups] as a group communication
library and is hence biased towards a peer-to-peer design.  Such design allows
Infinispan to exhibit self-healing characteristics, providing service even when
individual servers fail and new nodes are dynamically added to the grid.

Infinispan also makes use of TCP and optionally UDP network protocols, and can
be configured to make use of IP multicast for efficiency if supported by the
network.

== Deadlock
A deadlock is a situation in which two or more competing actions are each
waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither ever does.

== Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a class of a decentralized distributed system 
that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table; +(key, value)+ pairs
are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the
value associated with a given key. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping
from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change
in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a
DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node
arrivals, departures, and failures.

== Externalizer
An _Externalizer_ is a class that knows how to marshall a given object type to
a byte array, and how to unmarshall the contents of a byte array into an 
instance of the object type. Externalizers are effectively an Infinispan
extension that allows users to specify how their types are serialized. The
underlying Infinispan marshalling infrastructure builds on
link:$$http://www.jboss.org/jbossmarshalling$$[JBoss Marshalling] , and offers
efficient payloads and stream caching. This provides much better performance
than standard Java serialization. 

.More resources
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_plugging_infinispan_with_user_defined_externalizers[Plug your own Externalizer implementation] into Infinispan 

== Hot Rod
_Hot Rod_ is the name of Infinispan's custom TCP client/server protocol which
was created in order to overcome the deficiencies of other client/server
protocols such as Memcached. HotRod, as opposed to other protocols, has the
ability of handling failover on an Infinispan server cluster that undergoes a
topology change. To achieve this, the Hot Rod regularly informs the clients of
the cluster topology. 

Hot Rod enables clients to do smart routing of requests in partitioned, or
distributed, Infinispan server clusters. This means that Hot Rod clients can
determine the partition in which a key is located and communicate directly with
the server that contains the key. This is made possible by Infinispan servers
sending the cluster topology to clients, and the clients using the same
consistent hash as the servers.

.More resources
* Information about link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_hot_rod_protocol[the protocol]
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_using_hot_rod_server[Starting a Hot Rod server] 
* link:http://www.infinispan.org/hotrod-clients/[Hot Rod client libraries] 

== In-memory data grid
An in-memory data grid (IMDG) is a special type of data grid. In an IMDG, each
server uses its main system memory (RAM) as primary storage for data (as
opposed to disk-based storage). This allows for much greater concurrency, as
lock-free link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory$$[STM]
techniques such as link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compare-and-swap$$[compare-and-swap]
can be used to allow hardware threads accessing concurrent datasets. As such,
IMDGs are often considered far better optimized for a multi-core and multi-CPU
world when compared to disk-based solutions. In addition to greater concurrency,
IMDGs offer far lower latency access to data (even when compared to disk-based
data grids using
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive$$[solid state drives] ). 

The tradeoff is capacity. Disk-based grids, due to the far greater capacity of
hard disks, exhibit two (or even three) orders of magnitude greater capacity for
the same hardware cost.

== Isolation level
Isolation is a property that defines how/when the changes made by one operation
become visible to other concurrent operations. Isolation is one of the _ACID_
properties.

Infinispan ships with +REPEATABLE_READ+ and +READ_COMMITTED+ isolation levels,
the latter being the default.

== JTA synchronization
A link:$$http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/transaction/Synchronization.html$$[Synchronization]
is a listener which receives events relating to the transaction lifecycle. A
+Synchronization+ implementor receives two events, _before completion_ and
_after completion_ . Synchronizations are useful when certain activities are
required in the case of a transaction completion; a common usage for a
Synchronization is to flush an application's caches. 

== Livelock
A livelock is similar to a deadlock, except that the states of the processes
involved in the livelock constantly change with regard to one another, none
progressing. 

A real-world example of livelock occurs when two people meet in a narrow
corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass,
but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because
they both repeatedly move the same way at the same time.

== Memcached
Memcached is an in-memory caching system, often used to speed-up
database-driven websites. Memcached also defines a text based,
client/server, caching protocol, known as the Memcached protocol
Infinispan offers a server which speaks the Memcached protocol, allowing
Memcached itself to be replaced by Infinispan. Thanks to Infinispan's
clustering capabilities, it can offer data failover capabilities not present
in original Memcached systems.

.More resources
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_using_infinispan_memcached_server[Infinispan's Memcached Server]
* link:http://memcached.org[The memcached website]

== Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC)
Multiversion concurrency control is a concurrency control method commonly used
by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database
and in programming languages to implement transactional memory.

.More resources
* link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control[Wikipedia]

== Near Cache
A technique for caching data in the client when communicating with a remote
cache, for example, over the _Hot Rod_ protocol.  This technique helps
minimize remote calls to retrieve data.

== Network partition
Network partitions happens when multiple parts of a cluster become separated
due to some type of network failure, whether permanent or temporary.  Often
temporary failures heal spontaneously, within a few seconds or at most minutes,
but the damage that can occur during a network partition can lead to
inconsistent data.  Closely tied to
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem$$[Brewer's CAP theorem],
distributed systems choose to deal with a network partition by either
sacrificing availability (either by shutting down or going into read-only mode)
or consistency by allowing concurrent and divergent updates to the same data. 

Network partitions are also commonly known as a _Split Brain_, after the
biological condition of the same name. 

For more detailed discussion, see
link:$$http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/$$[this blog post]. 

== NoSQL
A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that
employs less constrained consistency models than traditional relational
databases. Motivations for this approach include simplicity of design,
horizontal scaling and finer control over availability. NoSQL databases are
often highly optimized key–value stores intended for simple retrieval and
appending operations, with the goal being significant performance benefits in
terms of latency and throughput. NoSQL databases are finding significant and
growing industry use in big data and real-time web applications.

== Optimistic locking
Optimistic locking is a concurrency control method that assumes that multiple
transactions can complete without affecting each other, and that therefore
transactions can proceed without locking the data resources that they affect.
Before committing, each transaction verifies that no other transaction has
modified its data. If the check reveals conflicting modifications, the
committing transaction rolls back.

== Pessimistic locking
A lock is used when multiple threads need to access data concurrently. This 
prevents data from being corrupted or invalidated when multiple threads try to
modify the same item of data. Any single thread can only modify data to which
it has applied a lock that gives them exclusive access to the record until the
lock is released.  However, pessimistic locking isn't ideal from a throughput
perspective, as locking is expensive and serializing writes may not be desired.
_Optimistic locking_ is often seen as a preferred alternative in many cases.

== READ COMMITTED
+READ_COMMITTED+ is one of two isolation levels the Infinispan's locking
infrastructure provides (the other is +REPEATABLE_READ+). Isolation levels
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_level#READ_COMMITTED$$[have their origins]
in relational databases. 

In Infinispan, +READ_COMMITTED+ works slightly differently to databases.
+READ_COMMITTED+ says that "data can be read as long as there is no write",
however in Infinispan, reads can happen anytime thanks to _MVCC_. MVCC allows
writes to happen on copies of data, rather than on the data itself. Thus, even
in the presence of a write, reads can still occur, and all read operations in
Infinispan are non-blocking (resulting in increased performance for the end
user). On the other hand, write operations are exclusive in Infinispan, (and so
work the same way as +READ_COMMITTED+ does in a database). 

With +READ_COMMITTED+, multiple reads of the same key within a transaction can
return different results, and this phenomenon is known as
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_level#Non-repeatable_reads$$[non-repeatable reads].
This issue is avoided with +REPETEABLE_READ+ isolation level. 

By default, Infinispan uses +READ_COMMITTED+ as isolation level.

== Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)
A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a database management system
 that is based on the relational model. Many popular databases currently in use
are based on the relational database model.

== REPEATABLE READ
+REPEATABLE_READ+ is one of two isolation levels the Infinispan's locking
infrastructure provides (the other is +READ_COMMITTED+). Isolation levels 
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_level#REPEATABLE_READ$$[have their origins]
in relational databases.

In Infinispan, +REPEATABLE_READ+ works slightly differently to databases.
+REPEATABLE_READ+ says that "data can be read as long as there are no writes,
and vice versa". This avoids the
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_level#Non-repeatable_reads$$[non-repeatable reads]
phenomenon, because once data has been written, no other transaction can read
it, so there's no chance of re-reading the data and finding different data. 

However, Infinispan has an +MVCC+ concurrency model that allows it to have
non-blocking reads. Infinispan provides +REPEATABLE_READ+ semantics by keeping
the previous value whenever an entry is modified. This allows Infinispan to
retrieve the previous value if a second read happens within the same transaction. 

== Representational State Transfer (ReST)
ReST is a software architectural style that promotes accessing resources via a
uniform generic interface. HTTP is an implementation of this architecture, and
generally when ReST is mentioned, it refers to ReST over HTTP protocol. When
HTTP is used, the uniform generic interface for accessing resources is formed
of GET, PUT, POST, DELETE and HEAD operations.

Infinispan's ReST server offers a ReSTful API based on these HTTP methods, and
 allow data to be stored, retrieved and deleted.

.More resources
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_infinispan_rest_server[The Infinispan REST Server]

== Split brain
A colloquial term for a _network partition_.  See _network partition_ for more details. 

== Structured Query Language (SQL)
SQL is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held 
in a relational database management system (RDBMS).  Originally based upon
relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL consists of a data
definition language and a data manipulation language. The scope of SQL includes
data insert, query, update and delete, schema creation and modification, and
data access control.

== Write-behind
_Write-behind_ is a cache store update mode. When this mode is used, updates to
the cache are asynchronously written to the cache store. Normally this means
that updates to the cache store are not performed in the client thread. 

An alternative cache store update mode is _write-through_. 

.More resources
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_write_through_and_write_behind_caching[Infinispan User guide] 

== Write skew
In a write skew anomaly, two transactions (T1 and T2) concurrently read an
overlapping data set (e.g. values V1 and V2), concurrently make disjoint
updates (e.g. T1 updates V1, T2 updates V2), and finally concurrently commit,
neither having seen the update performed by the other. Were the system
serializable, such an anomaly would be impossible, as either T1 or T2 would
have to occur "first", and be visible to the other. In contrast, snapshot
isolation such as +REPEATABLE_READ+ and +READ_COMMITTED+ permits write skew
anomalies.

Infinispan can detect write skews and can be configured to roll back
transactions when write skews are detected.

== Write-through
_Write-through_ is a cache store update mode. When this mode is used, clients
update a cache entry, e.g. via a +Cache.put()+ invocation, the call will not
return until Infinispan has updated the underlying cache store. Normally this
means that updates to the cache store are done in the client thread. 

An alternative mode in which cache stores can be updated is _write-behind_. 

.More resources
* link:../user_guide/user_guide.html#_write_through_and_write_behind_caching[Infinispan User guide] 

== XA resource
An XA resource is a participant in an XA transaction (also known as a
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA$$[distributed transaction]). For
example, given a distributed transaction that operates over a database and
Infinispan, XA defines both Infinispan and the database as XA resources. 

Java's API for XA transactions is
link:$$http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Transaction_API$$[JTA] and link:$$http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/transaction/xa/XAResource.html$$[XAResource]
is the Java interface that describes an XA resource.

