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Modern large-scale data management systems after 40 years of consensus

  • University of California at Santa Barbara

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Modern large-scale data management systems utilize consensus protocols to provide fault tolerance. Consensus protocols are extensively used in the distributed database infrastructure of large enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook as well as permissioned blockchain systems like IBM's Hyperledger Fabric. In the last four decades, numerous consensus protocols have been proposed to cover a broad spectrum of distributed database systems. On one hand, distributed networks might be synchronous, partially synchronous, or asynchronous, and on the other hand, infrastructures might consist of crashonly nodes, Byzantine nodes or both. In addition, a consensus protocol might follow a pessimistic or optimistic strategy to process transactions. Furthermore, while traditional consensus protocols assume a priori known set of nodes, in permissionless blockchains, nodes are assumed to be unknown. Finally, consensus protocols have explored a variety of performance trade-offs between the number of phases/messages (latency), the number of required nodes, message complexity, and the activity level of participants. In this tutorial, we discuss consensus protocols that are used in modern large-scale data management systems, classify them into different categories based on their assumptions on network synchrony, failure model of nodes, etc., and elaborate on their main advantages and limitations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2020
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages1794-1797
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781728129037
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2020
Event36th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2020 - Dallas, United States
Duration: Apr 20 2020Apr 24 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering
Volume2020-April
ISSN (Print)1084-4627

Conference

Conference36th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDallas
Period04/20/2004/24/20

Keywords

  • Consensus
  • Data Management
  • Fault Tolerance

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