Robert Escriva

HyperDex: a distributed, searchable key-value store

Distributed key-value stores are now a standard component of high-performance web services and cloud computing applications. While key-value stores offer significant performance and scalability advantages compared to traditional databases, they achieve these properties through a restricted API that limits object retrieval---an object can only be retrieved by the (primary and only) key under which it was inserted. This paper presents HyperDex, a novel distributed key-value store that provides a unique search primitive that enables queries on secondary attributes. The key insight behind HyperDex is the concept of hyperspace hashing in which objects with multiple attributes are mapped into a multidimensional hyperspace. This mapping leads to efficient implementations not only for retrieval by primary key, but also for partially-specified secondary attribute searches and range queries. A novel chaining protocol enables the system to achieve strong consistency, maintain availability and guarantee fault tolerance. An evaluation of the full system shows that HyperDex is 12-13x faster than Cassandra and MongoDB for finding partially specified objects. Additionally, HyperDex achieves 2-4x higher throughput for get/put operations.

Weaver: a high-performance, transactional graph database based on refinable timestamps

Graph databases have become a common infrastructure component. Yet existing systems either operate on offline snapshots, provide weak consistency guarantees, or use expensive concurrency control techniques that limit performance. In this paper, we introduce a new distributed graph database, called Weaver, which enables efficient, transactional graph analyses as well as strictly serializable ACID transactions on dynamic graphs. The key insight that allows Weaver to combine strict serializability with horizontal scalability and high performance is a novel request ordering mechanism called refinable timestamps. This technique couples coarse-grained vector timestamps with a fine-grained timeline oracle to pay the overhead of strong consistency only when needed. Experiments show that Weaver enables a Bitcoin blockchain explorer that is 8x faster than Blockchain.info, and achieves 10.9x higher throughput than the Titan graph database on social network workloads and 4x lower latency than GraphLab on offline graph traversal workloads.

Kronos: the design and implementation of an event ordering service

This paper proposes a new approach to determining the order of interdependent operations in a distributed system. The key idea behind our approach is to factor the task of tracking happens-before relationships out of components that comprise the system, and to centralize them in a separate event ordering service. This not only simplifies implementation of individual components by freeing them from having to propagate dependence information, but also enables dependence relationships to be maintained across multiple independent systems. A novel API enables the system to detect and take advantage of concurrency whenever possible by maintaining fine-grained information and binding events to a time order as late as possible. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach through several example applications, including a transactional key-value store, and an online graph store. Experiments show that our event ordering service scales well and has low overhead in practice.