Referential integrity (RI) is an important correctness property of a shared, distributed object storage system. It is sometimes thought that enforcing RI requires a strong form of consistency. In this paper, we argue that causal consistency suffices to maintain RI. We support this argument with pseudocode for a reference CRDT data type that maintains RI under causal consistency. QuickCheck has not found any errors in the model.
@article{arxiv.1803.03482,
title = {Ensuring referential integrity under causal consistency},
author = {Marc Shapiro and Annette Bieniusa and Peter Zeller and Gustavo Petri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.03482},
year = {2018}
}