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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Decibel : transactional branched versioning for relational data systems

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

As scientific endeavors and data analysis become increasingly collaborative, there is a need for data management systems that natively support the versioning or branching of datasets to enable concurrent analysis, cleaning, integration, manipulation, or curation of data across teams of individuals. Common practice for sharing and collaborating on datasets involves creating or storing multiple copies of the dataset, one for each stage of analysis, with no provenance information tracking the relationships between these datasets. This results not only in wasted storage, but also makes it challenging to track and integrate modifications made by different users to the same dataset. Transaction management (ACID) for such systems requires additional tools to efficiently handle concurrent changes and ensure transactional consistency of the version graph (concurrent versioned commits, branches, and merges as well as changes to records). Furthermore, a new conflict model is required to describe how versioned operations can interfere with each other while still remaining serializable. Decibel is a new relational storage system with built-in version control and transaction management designed to address these shortcomings. Decibel's natural versioning primitives can also be leveraged to implement versioned transactions. Thorough evaluation of three versioned storage engine designs that focus on efficient query processing with minimal storage overhead via the development of an exhaustive benchmark suggest that Decibel is vastly superior to and enables more cross version analysis and functionality than existing techniques and DVCS software like git. Read only and historical cross-version query transactions are non-blocking and proceed all in parallel with minimal overhead. The benchmark also supports analyzing performance of versioned databases with transactional support. It also enables rigorous testing and evaluation of future versioned storage engine designs.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2016

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Goehring, David (David G.)
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Samuel Madden.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106022
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/106022

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Goehring, David (David G.). Decibel : transactional branched versioning for relational data systems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106022