Supporting multi-row distributed transactions with global snapshot isolation using bare-bones HBase

Snapshot isolation (SI) is an important database transactional isolation level adopted by major database management systems (DBMS). Until now, there is no solution for any traditional DBMS to be easily replicated with global SI for distributed transactions in cloud computing environments. HBase is a column-oriented data store for Hadoop that has been proven to scale and perform well on clouds. HBase features random access performance on par with open source DBMS such as MySQL. However, HBase only provides single atomic row writes based on row locks and very limited transactional support. In this paper, we show how multi-row distributed transactions with global SI guarantee can be easily supported by using bare-bones HBase with its default configuration so that the high throughput, scalability, fault tolerance, access transparency and easy deployability properties of HBase can be inherited. Through performance studies, we quantify the cost of adopting our technique. The contribution of this paper is that we provide a novel approach to use HBase as a cloud database solution with global SI at low added cost. Our approach can be easily extended to other column-oriented data stores.