Lightweight transactions on networks of workstations

Although transactions have been a valuable abstraction of atomicity, persistency, and recoverability, they have not been widely used in programming environments today, mostly because of their high overheads that have been driven by the low performance of magnetic disks. A major challenge in transaction-based systems is to remove the magnetic disk from the critical path of transaction management. We present PERSEAS, a transaction library for main memory databases that decouples the performance of transactions from the magnetic disk speed. Our system is based on a layer of reliable main memory that provides fast and recoverable storage of data. We have implemented our system as a user-level library on top of the Windows NT operating system in a network of workstations connected with the SCI interconnection network. Our experimental results suggest that PERSEAS achieves performance that is orders of magnitude better than traditional recoverable main memory systems.