Online Schema Evolution is (Almost) Free for Snapshot Databases
Tianxun Hu, Tianzheng Wang, Qingqing Zhou

TL;DR
Tesseract enables online, transactional schema evolution in snapshot databases with minimal overhead by modeling schema changes as data modifications, avoiding downtime and maintaining high performance.
Contribution
The paper introduces Tesseract, a novel approach that leverages data modification operations to support online schema evolution without service interruption.
Findings
Supports schema changes with negligible performance impact
Operates without downtime across various workloads
Works efficiently on a 40-core server
Abstract
Modern database applications often change their schemas to keep up with the changing requirements. However, support for online and transactional schema evolution remains challenging in existing database systems. Specifically, prior work often takes ad hoc approaches to schema evolution with 'patches' applied to existing systems, leading to many corner cases and often incomplete functionality. Applications therefore often have to carefully schedule downtimes for schema changes, sacrificing availability. This paper presents Tesseract, a new approach to online and transactional schema evolution without the aforementioned drawbacks. We design Tesseract based on a key observation: in widely used multi-versioned database systems, schema evolution can be modeled as data modification operations that change the entire table, i.e., data-definition-as-modification (DDaM). This allows us to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Advanced Database Systems and Queries · Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services
