A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design

Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and - in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database research assessments identify database design as a strategic research direction. Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem? Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem. Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times. In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change

The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus

This paper presents a simple framework unifying a family of consensus algorithms that can tolerate process crash failures and asynchronous periods of the network, also called indulgent consensus algorithms. Key to the framework is a new abstraction we introduce here, called Alpha, and which precisely captures consensus safety. Implementations of Alpha in shared memory, storage area network, message passing and active disk systems are presented, leading to directly derived consensus algorithms suited to these communication media. The paper also considers the case where the number of processes is unknown and can be arbitrarily larg

HT-Paxos: High Throughput State-Machine Replication Protocol for Large Clustered Data Centers

Paxos is a prominent theory of state machine replication. Recent data intensive Systems those implement state machine replication generally require high throughput. Earlier versions of Paxos as few of them are classical Paxos, fast Paxos and generalized Paxos have a major focus on fault tolerance and latency but lacking in terms of throughput and scalability. A major reason for this is the heavyweight leader. Through offloading the leader, we can further increase throughput of the system. Ring Paxos, Multi Ring Paxos and S-Paxos are few prominent attempts in this direction for clustered data centers. In this paper, we are proposing HT-Paxos, a variant of Paxos that one is the best suitable for any large clustered data center. HT-Paxos further offloads the leader very significantly and hence increases the throughput and scalability of the system. While at the same time, among high throughput state-machine replication protocols, HT-Paxos provides reasonably low latency and response time