ForkBase: An Efficient Storage Engine for Blockchain and Forkable Applications

TL;DR

ForkBase is a specialized storage engine designed for blockchain and forkable applications, integrating core properties like versioning and fork semantics to improve performance and reduce development effort.

Contribution

It introduces a novel storage engine that embeds blockchain and fork semantics, supporting multi-versioning and duplicate content elimination for efficient storage and retrieval.

Findings

ForkBase achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art systems.

It significantly reduces development effort for forkable applications.

Demonstrated effectiveness across blockchain, wiki, and analytics applications.

Abstract

Existing data storage systems offer a wide range of functionalities to accommodate an equally diverse range of applications. However, new classes of applications have emerged, e.g., blockchain and collaborative analytics, featuring data versioning, fork semantics, tamper-evidence or any combination thereof. They present new opportunities for storage systems to efficiently support such applications by embedding the above requirements into the storage. In this paper, we present ForkBase, a storage engine specifically designed to provide efficient support for blockchain and forkable applications. By integrating the core application properties into the storage, ForkBase not only delivers high performance but also reduces development effort. Data in ForkBase is multi-versioned, and each version uniquely identifies the data content and its history. Two variants of fork semantics are supported in ForkBase to facilitate any collaboration workflows. A novel index structure is introduced to efficiently identify and eliminate duplicate content across data objects. Consequently, ForkBase is not only efficient in performance, but also in space requirement. We demonstrate the performance of ForkBase using three applications: a blockchain platform, a wiki engine and a collaborative analytics application. We conduct extensive experimental evaluation of these applications against respective state-of-the-art system. The results show that ForkBase achieves superior performance while significantly lowering the development cost.