Multi-tenant transactional databases frequently observe contention on shared data, leading to a need for performance isolation. Databases typically provide performance isolation via a request rate limit or quota per tenant, but this approach can lead to system underutilization. Traditionally, fair sharing has been applied to achieve both performance isolation and high utilization in other domains. In this paper, we address the problem of fair sharing for transactions, which introduces new challenges because client requests do not acquire resources all at once. We propose DRFT, the first fair transaction scheduling algorithm that ensures both the share guarantee and strategy-proofness by accurately accounting for transactional resource usage. We evaluate DRFT on a range of standard benchmarks and real-world workloads, showing that it ensures fairness with less than a 5% throughput overhead compared to state-of-the-art scheduling policies.

Modern applications span multiple clouds to reduce costs, avoid vendor lock-in, and leverage low-availability resources in another cloud. However, standard object stores operate within a single cloud, forcing users to manually manage data placement across clouds, i.e., navigate their diverse APIs and handle heterogeneous costs for network and storage. This is often a complex choice: users must either pay to store objects in a remote cloud, or pay to transfer them over the network based on application access patterns and cloud provider cost offerings. To address this, we present SkyStore, a unified object store that addresses cost-optimal data management across regions and clouds. SkyStore introduces a virtual object and bucket API to hide the complexity of interacting with multiple clouds. At its core, SkyStore has a novel TTL-based data placement policy that dynamically replicates and evicts objects according to application access patterns while optimizing for lower cost. Our evaluation shows that across various workloads, SkyStore reduces the overall cost by up to 6X over academic baselines and commercial alternatives like AWS multi-region buckets. SkyStore also has comparable latency, and its availability and fault tolerance are on par with standard cloud offerings.

Maximizing transaction throughput is key to high-performance database systems, which focus on minimizing data access conflicts to improve performance. However, finding efficient schedules that reduce conflicts remains an open problem. For efficiency, previous scheduling techniques consider only a small subset of possible schedules. In this work, we propose systematically exploring the entire schedule space, proactively identifying efficient schedules, and executing them precisely during execution to improve throughput. We introduce a greedy scheduling policy, SMF, that efficiently finds fast schedules and outperforms state-of-the-art search techniques. To realize the benefits of these schedules in practice, we develop a schedule-first concurrency control protocol, MVSchedO, that enforces fine-grained operation orders. We implement both in our system R-SMF, a modified version of RocksDB, to achieve up to a 3.9× increase in throughput and 3.2× reduction in tail latency on a range of benchmarks and real-world workloads.

This paper argues for better concurrency control to support mammoth transactions , which read and write to many items. While these requests are prevalent on graph data, few systems support them efficiently. Currently, developers must make the uncomfortable choice between accepting dismal performance or abandoning transactional semantics. Applications deserve better: we believe that inherent graph properties provide a path forward to designing efficient concurrency control that preserves strong isolation.

The continued emergence of large social network applications has introduced a scale of data and query volume that challenges the limits of existing data stores. However, few benchmarks accurately simulate these request patterns, leaving researchers in short supply of tools to evaluate and improve upon these systems. In this paper, we present a new benchmark, TAOBench, that captures the social graph workload at Meta. We open source workload configurations along with a benchmark that leverages these request features to both accurately model production workloads and generate emergent application behavior. We ensure the integrity of TAOBench's workloads by validating them against their production counterparts. We also describe several benchmark use cases at Meta and report results for five popular distributed database systems to demonstrate the benefits of using TAOBench to evaluate system tradeoffs as well as identify and address performance issues. Our benchmark fills a gap in the available tools and data that researchers and developers have to inform system design decisions.

Facebook's graph store TAO, like many other distributed data stores, traditionally prioritizes availability, efficiency, and scalability over strong consistency or isolation guarantees to serve its large, read-dominant workloads. As product developers build diverse applications on top of this system, they increasingly seek transactional semantics. However, providing advanced features for select applications while preserving the system's overall reliability and performance is a continual challenge. In this paper, we first characterize developer desires for transactions that have emerged over the years and describe the current failure-atomic (i.e., write) transactions offered by TAO. We then explore how to introduce an intuitive read transaction API. We highlight the need for atomic visibility guarantees in this API with a measurement study on potential anomalies that occur without stronger isolation for reads. Our analysis shows that 1 in 1,500 batched reads reflects partial transactional updates, which complicate the developer experience and lead to unexpected results. In response to our findings, we present the RAMP-TAO protocol, a variation based on the Read Atomic Multi-Partition (RAMP) protocols that can be feasibly deployed in production with minimal overhead while ensuring atomic visibility for a read-optimized workload at scale.