Bringing modular concurrency control to the next level

Database users face a tension between ease-of-programming and high performance: ACID transactions can greatly simplify the programming effort of database applications by providing four useful properties—atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, but enforcing these properties can degrade performance. This dissertation eases this tension by improving the performance of ACID transactions for scenarios where data contention is the bottleneck. The approach that we take is federating concurrency control (CC) mechanisms. It is based on the observation that any single CC mechanism is bound to make trade-offs that cause it to perform well in some cases but poorly in others. A federation opens the opportunity of applying each mechanism only to the set of transactions or workloads where it shines, while maintaining isolation. In particular, this work builds upon Modular Concurrency Control (MCC), a recent technique that federates CCs by partitioning transactions into groups, and by applying different CC mechanisms in each group. This dissertation addresses two critical shortcomings in the current embodiment of MCC. First, cross-group data conflicts are handled with a single, unoptimized CC mechanism that can significantly limit performance. Second, configuring MCC is a complex task, which runs counter to MCC’s purpose: to improve performance without sacrificing ease-of-programming. To address these problems, this dissertation presents Tebaldi, a new transactional database that brings Modular Concurrency Control to the next level, both figuratively and literally. Tebaldi introduces a new, hierarchical model to MCC that partitions transactions recursively to compose CC mechanisms in a multi-level tree. This model increases flexibility in federating CC mechanisms, which is the key to realizing the performance potential of federation. Tebaldi reduces configuration complexity by managing the MCC federation automatically: it can detect performance issues in the current workload in real-time, and automatically adjusts its configuration to improve its performance.Computer Science

DBKnot: A Transparent and Seamless, Pluggable Tamper Evident Database

Database integrity is crucial to organizations that rely on databases of important data. They suffer from the vulnerability to internal fraud. Database tampering by internal malicious employees with high technical authorization to their infrastructure or even compromised by externals is one of the important attack vectors. This thesis addresses such challenge in a class of problems where data is appended only and is immutable. Examples of operations where data does not change is a) financial institutions (banks, accounting systems, stock market, etc., b) registries and notary systems where important data is kept but is never subject to change, and c) system logs that must be kept intact for performance and forensic inspection if needed. The target of the approach is implementation seamlessness with little-or-no changes required in existing systems. Transaction tracking for tamper detection is done by utilizing a common hashtable that serially and cumulatively hashes transactions together while using an external time-stamper and signer to sign such linkages together. This allows transactions to be tracked without any of the organizations’ data leaving their premises and going to any third-party which also reduces the performance impact of tracking. This is done so by adding a tracking layer and embedding it inside the data workflow while keeping it as un-invasive as possible. DBKnot implements such features a) natively into databases, or b) embedded inside Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks, and finally c) outlines a direction of implementing it as a stand-alone microservice reverse-proxy. A prototype ORM and database layer has been developed and tested for seamlessness of integration and ease of use. Additionally, different models of optimization by implementing pipelining parallelism in the hashing/signing process have been tested in order to check their impact on performance. Stock-market information was used for experimentation with DBKnot and the initial results gave a slightly less than 100% increase in transaction time by using the most basic, sequential, and synchronous version of DBKnot. Signing and hashing overhead does not show significant increase per record with the increased amount of data. A number of different alternate optimizations were done to the design that via testing have resulted in significant increase in performance

LNCS

Concurrent accesses to shared data structures must be synchronized to avoid data races. Coarse-grained synchronization, which locks the entire data structure, is easy to implement but does not scale. Fine-grained synchronization can scale well, but can be hard to reason about. Hand-over-hand locking, in which operations are pipelined as they traverse the data structure, combines fine-grained synchronization with ease of use. However, the traditional implementation suffers from inherent overheads. This paper introduces snapshot-based synchronization (SBS), a novel hand-over-hand locking mechanism. SBS decouples the synchronization state from the data, significantly improving cache utilization. Further, it relies on guarantees provided by pipelining to minimize synchronization that requires cross-thread communication. Snapshot-based synchronization thus scales much better than traditional hand-over-hand locking, while maintaining the same ease of use