Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Barbara Liskov, Liuba Shrira, Chuang-Hue Moh, Steven Richman. Lazy modular upgrades in persistent object stores. In Ron Crocker, Guy L. Steele Jr., editors, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications, OOPSLA 2003, October 26-30, 2003, Anaheim, CA, USA. pages 403-417, ACM, 2003. [doi]
Persistent object stores require a way to automatically upgrade persistent objects, to change their code and storage representation. Automatic upgrades are a challenge for such systems. Upgrades must be performed in a way that is efficient both in space and time, and that does not stop application access to the store. In addition, however, the approach must be modular: it must allow programmers to reason locally about the correctness of their upgrades similar to the way they would reason about regular code. This paper provides solutions to both problems.The paper first defines upgrade modularity conditions that any upgrade system must satisfy to support local reasoning about upgrades. The paper then describes a new approach for executing upgrades efficiently while satisfying the upgrade modularity conditions. The approach exploits object encapsulation properties in a novel way. The paper also describes a prototype implementation and shows that our upgrade system imposes only a small overhead on application performance.