Beyond Isolation: Research Opportunities in Declarative Data-Driven Coordination

There are many database applications that require users to coordinate and communicate. Friends want to coordinate travel plans, students want to jointly enroll in the same set of courses, and busy professionals want to coordinate their schedules. These tasks are difficult to program using existing abstractions provided by database systems because in addition to the traditional ACID properties provided by the system they all require some type of coordination between users. This is fundamentally incompatible with isolation in the classical ACID properties. In this position paper, we argue that it is time for the database community to look beyond isolation towards principled and elegant abstractions that allow for communication and coordination between some notion of (suitably generalized) transactions. This new area of declarative data-driven coordination (D3C) is motivated by many novel applications and is full of challenging research problems. We survey existing abstractions in database systems and explain why they are insufficient for D3C, and we outline a plethora of exciting research problems.