Causal Consistency and Latency Optimality: Friend or Foe?

Causal consistency is an attractive consistency model for geo-replicated data stores. It is provably the strongest model that tolerates network partitions. It avoids the long latencies associated with strong consistency, and, especially when using read-only transactions (ROTs), it prevents many of the anomalies of weaker consistency models. Recent work has shown that causal consistency allows "latency-optimal" ROTs, that are nonblocking, single-round and single-version in terms of communication. On the surface, this latency optimality is very appealing, as the vast majority of applications are assumed to have read-dominated workloads.