Weakly Durable High-Performance Transactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces AciKV, a transactional system that employs weak durability to achieve high performance and strong transactional guarantees simultaneously, outperforming traditional systems in write-intensive workloads.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel weak durability model and a system design that decouples durability from commit, enabling high throughput with transactional guarantees.

Findings

AciKV achieves over 100x higher throughput than strongly durable systems on YCSB.

Weak durability allows for high parallelism and performance without sacrificing transactional properties.

Evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach in write-heavy workloads.

Abstract

Existing disk-based database systems largely fall into two categories -- they either provide very high performance but few guarantees, or expose the transaction abstraction satisfying the full ACID guarantees at the cost of lower performance. In this paper, we present an alternative that achieves the best of both worlds, namely good performance and transactional properties. Our key observation is that, because of the frequent use of synchronization primitives, systems with strong durability can hardly utilize the extremely high parallelism granted by modern storage devices. Thus, we explore the notion of weakly durable transactions, and discuss how to safely relax durability without compromising other transactional properties. We present AciKV, a transactional system whose design is centered around weak durability. AciKV exposes to users the normal transactional interface, but what sets it apart from others is a new "persist" primitive that decouples durability from commit. AciKV is a middle ground between systems that perform fast atomic operations, and ones that support transactions; this middle ground is useful as it provides similar performance to the former, while prevents isolation and consistency anomalies like the latter. Our evaluation using the YCSB benchmark shows that AciKV, under workloads that involve write requests, exhibits more than two orders of magnitude higher throughput than existing strongly durable systems.