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monotonic-reads · shipping · also Monotonic-read consistency

Monotonic reads

Monotonic reads is a session guarantee requiring successive reads to observe states that include the effects of writes relevant to the session's earlier reads.

Changing replicas must not make the session lose previously observed write effects. Values themselves need not increase numerically: a later valid update may decrease a counter. Monotonic reads does not alone require the freshest global state or visibility of the session's own writes that have not yet been read; read-your-writes is a separate guarantee.

Relations

related
linearizability, read-your-writes

Citations

  1. Douglas B. Terry et al. Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data. PDIS 1994, sections 3.1 and 3.2. (accessed 2026-10-12)
  2. Storage consistency: ordering is not a transaction or a durability promise (accessed 2026-10-12)

JSON: /data/terms/monotonic-reads.json