ACID Transactions

Google Spanner vs. Calvin: Is There a Clear Winner in the Battle for Global Consistency at Scale?

October 11, 2018

ACID Transactions CockroachDB Google Spanner How It Works

Google Spanner vs. Calvin: Is There a Clear Winner in the Battle for Global Consistency at Scale?

Prof. Daniel Abadi, lead inventor of the Calvin transaction management protocol and the PACELC theorem, wrote a thought-provoking post last month titled “NewSQL database systems are failing to guarantee consistency, and I blame Spanner”. The post takes a negative view of software-only Google Spanner derivative databases such as YugabyteDB and CockroachDB that use Spanner-like partitioned consensus for single shard transactions and a two phase commit (2PC) protocol for multi-shard (aka distributed) ACID transactions.

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How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugabyteDB?

August 8, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

ACID Transactions Distributed SQL Google Spanner How It Works

How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugabyteDB?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published August 8, 2018 and has been updated as of May 28, 2020.

As we saw in ”How Does Consensus-Based Replication Work in Distributed Databases?”, Raft has become the consensus replication algorithm of choice when it comes to building resilient, strongly consistent systems. YugabyteDB uses Raft for both leader election and data replication. Instead of having a single Raft group for the entire dataset in the cluster,

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6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

July 22, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

ACID Transactions How It Works

6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

First-generation NoSQL databases dropped ACID guarantees with the rationale that such guarantees are needed only by old-school enterprises running monolithic, relational applications in a single private data center. And the premise was that modern distributed apps should instead focus on linear database scalability along with low latency, mostly-accurate, single-key-only operations on shared-nothing storage (e.g. those provided by the public clouds).

Application developers who blindly accept the above reasoning are not serving their organizations well.

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Distributed ACID Transactions with High Performance

April 24, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

ACID Transactions Databases Distributed SQL Google Spanner How It Works Performance Benchmarks

Distributed ACID Transactions with High Performance

ACID transactions are a fundamental building block when developing business-critical, user-facing applications. They simplify the complex task of ensuring data integrity while supporting highly concurrent operations. While they are taken for granted in monolithic SQL/relational databases, distributed NoSQL/non-relational databases either forsake them completely or support only a highly restrictive single-row flavor (see sections below). This loss of ACID properties is usually justified with a gain in performance (measured in terms of low latency and/or high throughput).

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Practical Tradeoffs in Google Cloud Spanner, Azure Cosmos DB and YugabyteDB

January 25, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

ACID Transactions Amazon Web Services Distributed SQL Google Cloud Platform Google Spanner Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Practical Tradeoffs in Google Cloud Spanner, Azure Cosmos DB and YugabyteDB

Updated April 2019.

The famed CAP Theorem has been a source of much debate among distributed systems engineers. Those of us building distributed databases are often asked how we deal with it. In this post, we dive deeper into the consistency-availability tradeoff imposed by CAP which is only applicable during failure conditions. We also highlight the lesser-known-but-equally-important consistency-latency tradeoff imposed by the PACELC Theorem that extends CAP to normal operations.

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Building a Strongly Consistent Cassandra with Better Performance

December 20, 2017

By Robert Pang

ACID Transactions Apache Cassandra How It Works Performance Benchmarks

Building a Strongly Consistent Cassandra with Better Performance

In an earlier blog on database consistency, we had a detailed discussion on the risks and challenges applications face in dealing with eventually consistent NoSQL databases. We also dispelled the myth that eventually consistent DBs perform better than strongly consistent DBs. In this blog, we will look more closely into how YugabyteDB provides strong consistency while outperforming an eventually consistent DB like Apache Cassandra. Note that YugabyteDB retains drop-in compatibility with the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) API.

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Facebook’s User Database — Is it SQL or NoSQL?

August 29, 2017

By Karthik Ranganathan

ACID Transactions Databases Distributed SQL Google Spanner

Facebook’s User Database — Is it SQL or NoSQL?

Ever wondered which database Facebook (FB) uses to store the profiles of its 2.3B+ users? Is it SQL or NoSQL? How has FB database architecture evolved over the last 15+ years? As an engineer in FB database infrastructure team from 2007 to 2013, I had a front row seat in witnessing this evolution. There are invaluable lessons to be learned by better understanding the database evolution at the world’s largest social network,

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ACID Transactions

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