The scalability of existing shared-nothing databases quickly degrades in the presence of distributed transactions with the networking being the main reason. When distributed databases were designed, networks had low bandwidth, high latency, and high CPU overhead per message because of the traditional network stack. As a result, distributed database were designed to avoid distributed transactions as much as possible. Yet, with the advent of next generation of high-speed RDMA-enabled networks, it is time to revisit this design mantra of distributed DBMSs.

Distributed transactions on high-overhead TCP/IP-based networks were conventionally considered to be prohibitively expensive and thus were avoided at all costs. To that end, the primary goal of almost any existing partitioning scheme is to minimize the number of cross-partition transactions. However, with the new generation of fast RDMA-enabled networks, this assumption is no longer valid. In fact, recent work has shown that distributed databases can scale even when the majority of transactions are cross-partition. In this paper, we first make the case that the new bottleneck which hinders truly scalable transaction processing in modern RDMA-enabled databases is data contention, and that optimizing for data contention leads to different partitioning layouts than optimizing for the number of distributed transactions. We then present Chiller, a new approach to data partitioning and transaction execution, which aims to minimize data contention for both local and distributed transactions. Finally, we evaluate Chiller using various workloads, and show that our partitioning and execution strategy outperforms traditional partitioning techniques which try to avoid distributed transactions, by up to a factor of 2.

Highly available database systems rely on data replication to tolerate machine failures. Both classes of existing replication algorithms, active-passive and active-active, were designed in a time when network was the dominant performance bottleneck. In essence, these techniques aim to minimize network communication between replicas at the cost of incurring more processing redundancy; a trade-off that suitably fitted the conventional wisdom of distributed database design. However, the emergence of next-generation networks with high throughput and low latency calls for revisiting these assumptions. In this paper, we first make the case that in modern RDMA-enabled networks, the bottleneck has shifted to CPUs, and therefore the existing network-optimized replication techniques are no longer optimal. We present Active-Memory Replication , a new high availability scheme that efficiently leverages RDMA to completely eliminate the processing redundancy in replication. Using Active-Memory, all replicas dedicate their processing power to executing new transactions, as opposed to performing redundant computation. Active-Memory maintains high availability and correctness in the presence of failures through an efficient RDMA-based undo-logging scheme. Our evaluation against active-passive and active-active schemes shows that Active-Memory is up to a factor of 2 faster than the second-best protocol on RDMA-based networks.

The common wisdom is that distributed transactions do not scale. But what if distributed transactions could be made scalable using the next generation of networks and a redesign of distributed databases? There would no longer be a need for developers to worry about co-partitioning schemes to achieve decent performance. Application development would become easier as data placement would no longer determine how scalable an application is. Hardware provisioning would be simplified as the system administrator can expect a linear scale-out when adding more machines rather than some complex sub-linear function, which is highly application specific. In this paper, we present the design of our novel scalable database system NAM-DB and show that distributed transactions with the very common Snapshot Isolation guarantee can indeed scale using the next generation of RDMA-enabled network technology without any inherent bottlenecks. Our experiments with the TPC-C benchmark show that our system scales linearly to over 6.5 million new-order (14.5 million total) distributed transactions per second on 56 machines.

The next generation of high-performance networks with remote direct memory access (RDMA) capabilities requires a fundamental rethinking of the design of distributed in-memory DBMSs. These systems are commonly built under the assumption that the network is the primary bottleneck and should be avoided at all costs, but this assumption no longer holds. For instance, with InfiniBand FDR 4×, the bandwidth available to transfer data across the network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel. Moreover, RDMA transfer latencies continue to rapidly improve as well. In this paper, we first argue that traditional distributed DBMS architectures cannot take full advantage of high-performance networks and suggest a new architecture to address this problem. Then, we discuss initial results from a prototype implementation of our proposed architecture for OLTP and OLAP, showing remarkable performance improvements over existing designs.

Quality assurance is one the most important challenges in crowdsourcing. Assigning tasks to several workers to increase quality through redundant answers can be expensive if asking homogeneous sources. This limitation has been overlooked by current crowdsourcing platforms resulting therefore in costly solutions. In order to achieve desirable cost-quality tradeoffs it is essential to apply efficient crowd access optimization techniques. Our work argues that optimization needs to be aware of diversity and correlation of information within groups of individuals so that crowdsourcing redundancy can be adequately planned beforehand. Based on this intuitive idea, we introduce the Access Path Model (APM), a novel crowd model that leverages the notion of access paths as an alternative way of retrieving information. APM aggregates answers ensuring high quality and meaningful confidence. Moreover, we devise a greedy optimization algorithm for this model that finds a provably good approximate plan to access the crowd. We evaluate our approach on three crowdsourced datasets that illustrate various aspects of the problem. Our results show that the Access Path Model combined with greedy optimization is cost-efficient and practical to overcome common difficulties in large-scale crowdsourcing like data sparsity and anonymity.

In order to deal with mid-query failures in parallel data engines (PDEs), different fault-tolerance schemes are implemented today: (1) fault-tolerance in parallel databases is typically implemented in a coarse-grained manner by restarting a query completely when a mid-query failure occurs, and (2) modern MapReduce-style PDEs implement a fine-grained fault-tolerance scheme, which either materializes intermediate results or implements a lineage model to recover from mid-query failures. However, neither of these schemes can efficiently handle mixed workloads with both short running interactive queries as well as long running batch queries nor do these schemes efficiently support a wide range of different cluster setups which vary in cluster size and other parameters such as the mean time between failures. In this paper, we present a novel cost-based fault-tolerance scheme which tackles this issue. Compared to the existing schemes, our scheme selects a subset of intermediates to be materialized such that the total query runtime is minimized under mid-query failures. Our experiments show that our cost-based fault-tolerance scheme outperforms all existing strategies and always selects the sweet spot for short- and long running queries as well as for different cluster setups.

Parallel database systems horizontally partition large amounts of structured data in order to provide parallel data processing capabilities for analytical workloads in shared-nothing clusters. One major challenge when horizontally partitioning large amounts of data is to reduce the network costs for a given workload and a database schema. A common technique to reduce the network costs in parallel database systems is to co-partition tables on their join key in order to avoid expensive remote join operations. However, existing partitioning schemes are limited in that respect since only subsets of tables in complex schemata sharing the same join key can be co-partitioned unless tables are fully replicated.

Typically, fault-tolerance in parallel database systems is handled by restarting a query completely when a node failure happens. However, when deploying a parallel database on a cluster of commodity machines or on IaaS offerings such as Amazon's Spot Instances, node failures are a common case. This requires a more fine-granular fault-tolerance scheme. Therefore, most recent parallel data management platforms such as Hadoop or Shark use a fine-grained fault-tolerance scheme, which materializes all intermediate results in order to be able to recover from mid-query faults. While such a fine-grained fault-tolerance scheme is able to efficiently handle node failures for complex and long-running queries, it is not optimal for short-running latency-sensitive queries since the additional costs for materialization often outweigh the costs for actually executing the query. In this demo, we showcase our novel cost-based fault-tolerance scheme in XDB. It selects which intermediate results to materialize such that the overall query runtime is minimized in the presence of node failures. For the demonstration, we present a computer game called DoomDB. DoomDB is designed as an ego-shooter game with the goal of killing nodes in an XDB database cluster and thus prevent a given query to produce its final result in a given time frame. One interesting use-case of DoomDB is to use it for crowdsourcing the testing activities of XDB.

Parallel database systems are major platforms for supporting analytical queries over large data sets. However, in order to offer SQL-like services for data analytics in the cloud, providers such as Amazon and Google do often build their own systems (e.g., BigTable). One reason is that existing database systems do not fulfill important requirements such as elasticity and fine-grained fault-tolerance. In this poster, we present XDB [2, 3], a parallel database system which implements two novel concepts: (1) a partitioning scheme that supports elasticity with regard to data and queries, and (2) a fine-grained fault-tolerance scheme for short- and long-running queries.