Andrew Kyle Purtell created HBASE-24440:
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             Summary: Prevent temporal misordering on timescales smaller than 
one clock tick
                 Key: HBASE-24440
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-24440
             Project: HBase
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Andrew Kyle Purtell


When mutations are sent to the servers without a timestamp explicitly assigned 
by the client the server will substitute the current wall clock time. There are 
edge cases where it is at least theoretically possible for more than one 
mutation to be committed to a given row within the same clock tick. When this 
happens we have to track and preserve the ordering of these mutations in some 
other way besides the timestamp component of the key. Let me bypass most 
discussion here by noting that whether we do this or not, we do not pass such 
ordering information in the cross cluster replication protocol. We also have 
interesting edge cases regarding key type precedence when mutations arrive 
"simultaneously": we sort deletes ahead of puts. This, especially in the 
presence of replication, can lead to visible anomalies for clients able to 
interact with both source and sink. 

There is a simple solution that removes the possibility that these edge cases 
can occur: 

We can detect, when we are about to commit a mutation to a row, if we have 
already committed a mutation to this same row in the current clock tick. 
Occurrences of this condition will be rare. We are already tracking current 
time. We have to know this in order to assign the timestamp. Where this becomes 
interesting is how we might track the last commit time per row. Making the 
detection of this case efficient for the normal code path is the bulk of the 
challenge. We would do this somehow via the memstore. Assuming we can 
efficiently know if we are about to commit twice to the same row within a 
single clock tick, we would simply sleep/yield the current thread until the 
clock ticks over, and then proceed. 



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