Improving MMDB distributed transactional concurrency
Weiwei Gong, Patrick O’Neil, Elizabeth J. O'Neil · 2014
Main Memory Database Systems (MMDBs) have been studied since the 80s [3,4], when memory was quite costly ($1500 per MByte in 1984). We can now buy memory for about $10 per GByte. An advantage of MMDBs is that serial execution of a non-distributed transaction on a uniprocessor from start to finish saves the work of disk I/O, locking, latching and deadlock handling [7]. The 2013 Bulletin on Data Engineering [11] had eight articles on recent MMDBs and only three mentioned distributed transactions. Implementing fast, serializable, distributed transactions on an MMDB is difficult, since communication delays typically leave some CPUs idle and reduce total throughput.