Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems

  • Authors:

  • Alexander Thomson;Thaddeus Diamond;Shu-Chun Weng;Kun Ren;Philip Shao;Daniel J. Abadi

  • Affiliations:

  • Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

  • Venue:
  • SIGMOD '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Many distributed storage systems achieve high data access throughput via partitioning and replication, each system with its own advantages and tradeoffs. In order to achieve high scalability, however, today's systems generally reduce transactional support, disallowing single transactions from spanning multiple partitions. Calvin is a practical transaction scheduling and data replication layer that uses a deterministic ordering guarantee to significantly reduce the normally prohibitive contention costs associated with distributed transactions. Unlike previous deterministic database system prototypes, Calvin supports disk-based storage, scales near-linearly on a cluster of commodity machines, and has no single point of failure. By replicating transaction inputs rather than effects, Calvin is also able to support multiple consistency levels---including Paxos-based strong consistency across geographically distant replicas---at no cost to transactional throughput.