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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Logical timestamps in distributed transaction processing systems

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Distributed transactions are such transactions with remote data access. They usually suffer from high network latency (compared to the internal overhead) during data operations on remote data servers, and therefore lengthen the entire transaction executiont time. This increases the probability of conflicting with other transactions, causing high abort rates. This, in turn, causes poor performance. In this work, we constructed Sundial, a distributed concurrency control algorithm that applies logical timestamps seaminglessly with a cache protocol, and works in a hybrid fashion where an optimistic approach is combined with lock-based schemes. Sundial tackles the inefficiency problem in two ways. Firstly, Sundial decides the order of transactions on the fly. Transactions get their commit timestamp according to their data access traces. Each data item in the database has logical leases maintained by the system. A lease corresponds to a version of the item. At any logical time point, only a single transaction holds the 'lease' for any particular data item. Therefore, lease holders do not have to worry about someone else writing to the item because in the logical timeline, the data writer needs to acquire a new lease which is disjoint from the holder's. This lease information is used to calculate the logical commit time for transactions. Secondly, Sundial has a novel caching scheme that works together with logical leases. The scheme allows the local data server to automatically cache data from the remote server while preserving data coherence. We benchmarked Sundial along with state-of-the-art distributed transactional concurrency control protocols. On YCSB, Sundial outperforms the second best protocol by 57% under high data access contention. On TPC-C, Sundial has a 34% improvement over the state-of-the-art candidate. Our caching scheme has performance gain comparable with hand-optimized data replication. With high access skew, it speeds the workload by up to 4.6 x.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
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
2018

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Xia, Yu(Scientist in electrical engineering and computer science)Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Srinivas Devadas.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122877
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122877

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

Xia, Yu(Scientist in electrical engineering and computer science)Massachusetts Institute of Technology.. Logical timestamps in distributed transaction processing systems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122877