What is a "Lightweight Transaction" and why are they called so?

Question

I am reading about how lightweight transactions are achieved in C* using Paxos and how they offer linearizability. But I want to know why they are called "lightweight". They are also known as compare and set. So what characteristics define a transaction to be a lightweight one?

Answer 1

Cassandra's transactions differ from the more traditional "heavy" transactions supported by many relational systems. Here are some key points of difference:

• They do not allow for explicit commit/rollback functionality
• They do not guarantee atomicity across partitions
• They provide only very simple constraint checking rather than the more complex multi-statement transactions commonly seen in RDBMS

Thus, one could say they are "lightweight" in comparison to other more familiar transaction models.