An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control Rachael Harding Dana Van Aken MIT CSAIL Carnegie Mellon University
[email protected] [email protected] Andrew Pavlo Michael Stonebraker Carnegie Mellon University MIT CSAIL
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT there is little understanding of the trade-offs in a modern cloud Increasing transaction volumes have led to a resurgence of interest computing environment offering high scalability and elasticity. Few in distributed transaction processing. In particular, partitioning data of the recent publications that propose new distributed protocols across several servers can improve throughput by allowing servers compare more than one other approach. For example, none of the to process transactions in parallel. But executing transactions across papers published since 2012 in Table 1 compare against timestamp- servers limits the scalability and performance of these systems. based or multi-version protocols, and seven of them do not compare In this paper, we quantify the effects of distribution on concur- to any other serializable protocol. As a result, it is difficult to rency control protocols in a distributed environment. We evaluate six compare proposed protocols, especially as hardware and workload classic and modern protocols in an in-memory distributed database configurations vary across publications. evaluation framework called Deneva, providing an apples-to-apples Our aim is to quantify and compare existing distributed concur- comparison between each. Our results expose severe limitations of rency control protocols for in-memory DBMSs. We develop an distributed transaction processing engines. Moreover, in our anal- empirical understanding of the behavior of distributed transactions ysis, we identify several protocol-specific scalability bottlenecks.