Warp: Multi-Key Transactions for Key-Value Stores by Robert Escriva, Bernard Wong and Emin Gün Sirer†.
Abstract:
Implementing ACID transactions has been a longstanding challenge for NoSQL systems. Because these systems are based on a sharded architecture, transactions necessarily require coordination across multiple servers. Past work in this space has relied either on heavyweight protocols such as Paxos or clock synchronization for this coordination.
This paper presents a novel protocol for coordinating distributed transactions with ACID semantics on top of a sharded data store. Called linear transactions, this protocol achieves scalability by distributing the coordination task to only those servers that hold relevant data for each transaction. It achieves high performance by serializing only those transactions whose concurrent execution could potentially yield a violation of ACID semantics. Finally, it naturally integrates chain-replication and can thus tolerate faults of both clients and servers. We have fully implemented linear transactions in a commercially available data store. Experiments show that the throughput of this system achieves 1-9× more throughput than MongoDB, Cassandra and HyperDex on the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark, even though none of the latter systems provide transactional guarantees.
Warp looks wicked cool!
Of particular interest is the non-ordering of transactions that have no impact on other transactions. That alone would be interesting for a topic map merging situation.
For more details, see the Warp page, or
I first saw this at High Scalability.