Designing

Data-Intensive

Applications

THE BIG IDEAS BEHIND RELIABLE, SCALABLE,

AND MAINTAINABLE SYSTEMS

Martin Kleppmann

Designing Data-Intensive

Applications

The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable,

and Maintainable Systems

Martin Kleppmann

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

by Martin Kleppmann

Copyright © 2017 Martin Kleppmann. All rights reserved.

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978-1-449-37332-0

[LSI]

Technology is a powerful force in our society. Data, software, and communication can

be used for bad: to entrench unfair power structures, to undermine human rights, and

to protect vested interests. But they can also be used for good: to make underrepresented

people’s voices heard, to create opportunities for everyone, and to avert disasters. This

book is dedicated to everyone working toward the good.

Computing is pop culture. […] Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all

about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation,

the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who

write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from].

—Alan Kay, in interview with Dr Dobb’s Journal (2012) Table of Contents

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Part I. Foundations of Data Systems

1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Thinking About Data Systems 4

Reliability 6

Hardware Faults 7

Software Errors 8

Human Errors 9

How Important Is Reliability? 10

Scalability 10

Describing Load 11

Describing Performance 13

Approaches for Coping with Load 17

Maintainability 18

Operability: Making Life Easy for Operations 19

Simplicity: Managing Complexity 20

Evolvability: Making Change Easy 21

Summary 22

2. Data Models and Query Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Relational Model Versus Document Model 28

The Birth of NoSQL 29

The Object-Relational Mismatch 29

Many-to-One and Many-to-Many Relationships 33

Are Document Databases Repeating History? 36

vii

Relational Versus Document Databases Today 38

Query Languages for Data 42

Declarative Queries on the Web 44

MapReduce Querying 46

Graph-Like Data Models 49

Property Graphs 50

The Cypher Query Language 52

Graph Queries in SQL 53

Triple-Stores and SPARQL 55

The Foundation: Datalog 60

Summary 63

3. Storage and Retrieval. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Data Structures That Power Your Database 70

Hash Indexes 72

SSTables and LSM-Trees 76

B-Trees 79

Comparing B-Trees and LSM-Trees 83

Other Indexing Structures 85

Transaction Processing or Analytics? 90

Data Warehousing 91

Stars and Snowflakes: Schemas for Analytics 93

Column-Oriented Storage 95

Column Compression 97

Sort Order in Column Storage 99

Writing to Column-Oriented Storage 101

Aggregation: Data Cubes and Materialized Views 101

Summary 103

4. Encoding and Evolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Formats for Encoding Data 112

Language-Specific Formats 113

JSON, XML, and Binary Variants 114

Thrift and Protocol Buffers 117

Avro 122

The Merits of Schemas 127

Modes of Dataflow 128

Dataflow Through Databases 129

Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC 131

Message-Passing Dataflow 136

Summary 139

viii | Table of Contents

Part II. Distributed Data

5. Replication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Leaders and Followers 152

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Replication 153

Setting Up New Followers 155

Handling Node Outages 156

Implementation of Replication Logs 158

Problems with Replication Lag 161

Reading Your Own Writes 162

Monotonic Reads 164

Consistent Prefix Reads 165

Solutions for Replication Lag 167

Multi-Leader Replication 168

Use Cases for Multi-Leader Replication 168

Handling Write Conflicts 171

Multi-Leader Replication Topologies 175

Leaderless Replication 177

Writing to the Database When a Node Is Down 177

Limitations of Quorum Consistency 181

Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff 183

Detecting Concurrent Writes 184

Summary 192

6. Partitioning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Partitioning and Replication 200

Partitioning of Key-Value Data 201

Partitioning by Key Range 202

Partitioning by Hash of Key 203

Skewed Workloads and Relieving Hot Spots 205

Partitioning and Secondary Indexes 206

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Document 206

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Term 208

Rebalancing Partitions 209

Strategies for Rebalancing 210

Operations: Automatic or Manual Rebalancing 213

Request Routing 214

Parallel Query Execution 216

Summary 216

7. Transactions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction 222

Table of Contents | ix

The Meaning of ACID 223

Single-Object and Multi-Object Operations 228

Weak Isolation Levels 233

Read Committed 234

Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read 237

Preventing Lost Updates 242

Write Skew and Phantoms 246

Serializability 251

Actual Serial Execution 252

Two-Phase Locking (2PL) 257

Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) 261

Summary 266

8. The Trouble with Distributed Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Faults and Partial Failures 274

Cloud Computing and Supercomputing 275

Unreliable Networks 277

Network Faults in Practice 279

Detecting Faults 280

Timeouts and Unbounded Delays 281

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks 284

Unreliable Clocks 287

Monotonic Versus Time-of-Day Clocks 288

Clock Synchronization and Accuracy 289

Relying on Synchronized Clocks 291

Process Pauses 295

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies 300

The Truth Is Defined by the Majority 300

Byzantine Faults 304

System Model and Reality 306

Summary 310

9. Consistency and Consensus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Consistency Guarantees 322

Linearizability 324

What Makes a System Linearizable? 325

Relying on Linearizability 330

Implementing Linearizable Systems 332

The Cost of Linearizability 335

Ordering Guarantees 339

Ordering and Causality 339

Sequence Number Ordering 343

x | Table of Contents

Total Order Broadcast 348

Distributed Transactions and Consensus 352

Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC) 354

Distributed Transactions in Practice 360

Fault-Tolerant Consensus 364

Membership and Coordination Services 370

Summary 373

Part III. Derived Data

10. Batch Processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389

Batch Processing with Unix Tools 391

Simple Log Analysis 391

The Unix Philosophy 394

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems 397

MapReduce Job Execution 399

Reduce-Side Joins and Grouping 403

Map-Side Joins 408

The Output of Batch Workflows 411

Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases 414

Beyond MapReduce 419

Materialization of Intermediate State 419

Graphs and Iterative Processing 424

High-Level APIs and Languages 426

Summary 429

11. Stream Processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439

Transmitting Event Streams 440

Messaging Systems 441

Partitioned Logs 446

Databases and Streams 451

Keeping Systems in Sync 452

Change Data Capture 454

Event Sourcing 457

State, Streams, and Immutability 459

Processing Streams 464

Uses of Stream Processing 465

Reasoning About Time 468

Stream Joins 472

Fault Tolerance 476

Summary 479

Table of Contents | xi

12. The Future of Data Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489

Data Integration 490

Combining Specialized Tools by Deriving Data 490

Batch and Stream Processing 494

Unbundling Databases 499

Composing Data Storage Technologies 499

Designing Applications Around Dataflow 504

Observing Derived State 509

Aiming for Correctness 515

The End-to-End Argument for Databases 516

Enforcing Constraints 521

Timeliness and Integrity 524

Trust, but Verify 528

Doing the Right Thing 533

Predictive Analytics 533

Privacy and Tracking 536

Summary 543

Glossary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559

xii | Table of Contents

Preface

If you have worked in software engineering in recent years, especially in server-side

and backend systems, you have probably been bombarded with a plethora of buzz‐

words relating to storage and processing of data. NoSQL! Big Data! Web-scale!

Sharding! Eventual consistency! ACID! CAP theorem! Cloud services! MapReduce!

Real-time!

In the last decade we have seen many interesting developments in databases, in dis‐

tributed systems, and in the ways we build applications on top of them. There are

various driving forces for these developments:

• Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn,

Microsoft, and Twitter are handling huge volumes of data and traffic, forcing

them to create new tools that enable them to efficiently handle such scale.

• Businesses need to be agile, test hypotheses cheaply, and respond quickly to new

market insights by keeping development cycles short and data models flexible.

• Free and open source software has become very successful and is now preferred

to commercial or bespoke in-house software in many environments.

• CPU clock speeds are barely increasing, but multi-core processors are standard,

and networks are getting faster. This means parallelism is only going to increase.

• Even if you work on a small team, you can now build systems that are distributed

across many machines and even multiple geographic regions, thanks to infra‐

structure as a service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services.

• Many services are now expected to be highly available; extended downtime due

to outages or maintenance is becoming increasingly unacceptable.

Data-intensive applications are pushing the boundaries of what is possible by making

use of these technological developments. We call an application data-intensive if data

is its primary challenge—the quantity of data, the complexity of data, or the speed at

Preface | xiii

which it is changing—as opposed to compute-intensive, where CPU cycles are the

bottleneck.

The tools and technologies that help data-intensive applications store and process

data have been rapidly adapting to these changes. New types of database systems

(“NoSQL”) have been getting lots of attention, but message queues, caches, search

indexes, frameworks for batch and stream processing, and related technologies are

very important too. Many applications use some combination of these.

The buzzwords that fill this space are a sign of enthusiasm for the new possibilities,

which is a great thing. However, as software engineers and architects, we also need to

have a technically accurate and precise understanding of the various technologies and

their trade-offs if we want to build good applications. For that understanding, we

have to dig deeper than buzzwords.

Fortunately, behind the rapid changes in technology, there are enduring principles

that remain true, no matter which version of a particular tool you are using. If you

understand those principles, you’re in a position to see where each tool fits in, how to

make good use of it, and how to avoid its pitfalls. That’s where this book comes in.

The goal of this book is to help you navigate the diverse and fast-changing landscape

of technologies for processing and storing data. This book is not a tutorial for one

particular tool, nor is it a textbook full of dry theory. Instead, we will look at examples

of successful data systems: technologies that form the foundation of many popular

applications and that have to meet scalability, performance, and reliability require‐

ments in production every day.

We will dig into the internals of those systems, tease apart their key algorithms, dis‐

cuss their principles and the trade-offs they have to make. On this journey, we will try

to find useful ways of thinking about data systems—not just how they work, but also

why they work that way, and what questions we need to ask.

After reading this book, you will be in a great position to decide which kind of tech‐

nology is appropriate for which purpose, and understand how tools can be combined

to form the foundation of a good application architecture. You won’t be ready to

build your own database storage engine from scratch, but fortunately that is rarely

necessary. You will, however, develop a good intuition for what your systems are

doing under the hood so that you can reason about their behavior, make good design

decisions, and track down any problems that may arise.

Who Should Read This Book?

If you develop applications that have some kind of server/backend for storing or pro‐

cessing data, and your applications use the internet (e.g., web applications, mobile

apps, or internet-connected sensors), then this book is for you.

xiv | Preface

This book is for software engineers, software architects, and technical managers who

love to code. It is especially relevant if you need to make decisions about the architec‐

ture of the systems you work on—for example, if you need to choose tools for solving

a given problem and figure out how best to apply them. But even if you have no

choice over your tools, this book will help you better understand their strengths and

weaknesses.

You should have some experience building web-based applications or network serv‐

ices, and you should be familiar with relational databases and SQL. Any non-

relational databases and other data-related tools you know are a bonus, but not

required. A general understanding of common network protocols like TCP and

HTTP is helpful. Your choice of programming language or framework makes no dif‐

ference for this book.

If any of the following are true for you, you’ll find this book valuable:

• You want to learn how to make data systems scalable, for example, to support

web or mobile apps with millions of users.

• You need to make applications highly available (minimizing downtime) and

operationally robust.

• You are looking for ways of making systems easier to maintain in the long run,

even as they grow and as requirements and technologies change.

• You have a natural curiosity for the way things work and want to know what

goes on inside major websites and online services. This book breaks down the

internals of various databases and data processing systems, and it’s great fun to

explore the bright thinking that went into their design.

Sometimes, when discussing scalable data systems, people make comments along the

lines of, “You’re not Google or Amazon. Stop worrying about scale and just use a

relational database.” There is truth in that statement: building for scale that you don’t

need is wasted effort and may lock you into an inflexible design. In effect, it is a form

of premature optimization. However, it’s also important to choose the right tool for

the job, and different technologies each have their own strengths and weaknesses. As

we shall see, relational databases are important but not the final word on dealing with

data.

Scope of This Book

This book does not attempt to give detailed instructions on how to install or use spe‐

cific software packages or APIs, since there is already plenty of documentation for

those things. Instead we discuss the various principles and trade-offs that are funda‐

mental to data systems, and we explore the different design decisions taken by differ‐

ent products.

Preface | xv

In the ebook editions we have included links to the full text of online resources. All

links were verified at the time of publication, but unfortunately links tend to break

frequently due to the nature of the web. If you come across a broken link, or if you

are reading a print copy of this book, you can look up references using a search

engine. For academic papers, you can search for the title in Google Scholar to find

open-access PDF files. Alternatively, you can find all of the references at https://

github.com/ept/ddia-references, where we maintain up-to-date links.

We look primarily at the architecture of data systems and the ways they are integrated

into data-intensive applications. This book doesn’t have space to cover deployment,

operations, security, management, and other areas—those are complex and impor‐

tant topics, and we wouldn’t do them justice by making them superficial side notes in

this book. They deserve books of their own.

Many of the technologies described in this book fall within the realm of the Big Data

buzzword. However, the term “Big Data” is so overused and underdefined that it is

not useful in a serious engineering discussion. This book uses less ambiguous terms,

such as single-node versus distributed systems, or online/interactive versus offline/

batch processing systems.

This book has a bias toward free and open source software (FOSS), because reading,

modifying, and executing source code is a great way to understand how something

works in detail. Open platforms also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. However,

where appropriate, we also discuss proprietary software (closed-source software, soft‐

ware as a service, or companies’ in-house software that is only described in literature

but not released publicly).

Outline of This Book

This book is arranged into three parts:

1. In Part I, we discuss the fundamental ideas that underpin the design of data-

intensive applications. We start in Chapter 1 by discussing what we’re actually

trying to achieve: reliability, scalability, and maintainability; how we need to

think about them; and how we can achieve them. In Chapter 2 we compare sev‐

eral different data models and query languages, and see how they are appropriate

to different situations. In Chapter 3 we talk about storage engines: how databases

arrange data on disk so that we can find it again efficiently. Chapter 4 turns to

formats for data encoding (serialization) and evolution of schemas over time.

2. In Part II, we move from data stored on one machine to data that is distributed

across multiple machines. This is often necessary for scalability, but brings with

it a variety of unique challenges. We first discuss replication (Chapter 5), parti‐

tioning/sharding (Chapter 6), and transactions (Chapter 7). We then go into

xvi | Preface

more detail on the problems with distributed systems (Chapter 8) and what it

means to achieve consistency and consensus in a distributed system (Chapter 9).

3. In Part III, we discuss systems that derive some datasets from other datasets.

Derived data often occurs in heterogeneous systems: when there is no one data‐

base that can do everything well, applications need to integrate several different

databases, caches, indexes, and so on. In Chapter 10 we start with a batch pro‐

cessing approach to derived data, and we build upon it with stream processing in

Chapter 11. Finally, in Chapter 12 we put everything together and discuss

approaches for building reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications in the

future.

References and Further Reading

Most of what we discuss in this book has already been said elsewhere in some form or

another—in conference presentations, research papers, blog posts, code, bug trackers,

mailing lists, and engineering folklore. This book summarizes the most important

ideas from many different sources, and it includes pointers to the original literature

throughout the text. The references at the end of each chapter are a great resource if

you want to explore an area in more depth, and most of them are freely available

online.

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Preface | xvii

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Acknowledgments

This book is an amalgamation and systematization of a large number of other peo‐

ple’s ideas and knowledge, combining experience from both academic research and

industrial practice. In computing we tend to be attracted to things that are new and

shiny, but I think we have a huge amount to learn from things that have been done

before. This book has over 800 references to articles, blog posts, talks, documenta‐

tion, and more, and they have been an invaluable learning resource for me. I am very

grateful to the authors of this material for sharing their knowledge.

I have also learned a lot from personal conversations, thanks to a large number of

people who have taken the time to discuss ideas or patiently explain things to me. In

particular, I would like to thank Joe Adler, Ross Anderson, Peter Bailis, Márton

Balassi, Alastair Beresford, Mark Callaghan, Mat Clayton, Patrick Collison, Sean

Cribbs, Shirshanka Das, Niklas Ekström, Stephan Ewen, Alan Fekete, Gyula Fóra,

Camille Fournier, Andres Freund, John Garbutt, Seth Gilbert, Tom Haggett, Pat Hel‐

land, Joe Hellerstein, Jakob Homan, Heidi Howard, John Hugg, Julian Hyde, Conrad

Irwin, Evan Jones, Flavio Junqueira, Jessica Kerr, Kyle Kingsbury, Jay Kreps, Carl

Lerche, Nicolas Liochon, Steve Loughran, Lee Mallabone, Nathan Marz, Caitie

xviii | Preface

McCaffrey, Josie McLellan, Christopher Meiklejohn, Ian Meyers, Neha Narkhede,

Neha Narula, Cathy O’Neil, Onora O’Neill, Ludovic Orban, Zoran Perkov, Julia

Powles, Chris Riccomini, Henry Robinson, David Rosenthal, Jennifer Rullmann,

Matthew Sackman, Martin Scholl, Amit Sela, Gwen Shapira, Greg Spurrier, Sam

Stokes, Ben Stopford, Tom Stuart, Diana Vasile, Rahul Vohra, Pete Warden, and

Brett Wooldridge.

Several more people have been invaluable to the writing of this book by reviewing

drafts and providing feedback. For these contributions I am particularly indebted to

Raul Agepati, Tyler Akidau, Mattias Andersson, Sasha Baranov, Veena Basavaraj,

David Beyer, Jim Brikman, Paul Carey, Raul Castro Fernandez, Joseph Chow, Derek

Elkins, Sam Elliott, Alexander Gallego, Mark Grover, Stu Halloway, Heidi Howard,

Nicola Kleppmann, Stefan Kruppa, Bjorn Madsen, Sander Mak, Stefan Podkowinski,

Phil Potter, Hamid Ramazani, Sam Stokes, and Ben Summers. Of course, I take all

responsibility for any remaining errors or unpalatable opinions in this book.

For helping this book become real, and for their patience with my slow writing and

unusual requests, I am grateful to my editors Marie Beaugureau, Mike Loukides, Ann

Spencer, and all the team at O’Reilly. For helping find the right words, I thank Rachel

Head. For giving me the time and freedom to write in spite of other work commit‐

ments, I thank Alastair Beresford, Susan Goodhue, Neha Narkhede, and Kevin Scott.

Very special thanks are due to Shabbir Diwan and Edie Freedman, who illustrated

with great care the maps that accompany the chapters. It’s wonderful that they took

on the unconventional idea of creating maps, and made them so beautiful and com‐

pelling.

Finally, my love goes to my family and friends, without whom I would not have been

able to get through this writing process that has taken almost four years. You’re the

best.

Preface | xix

PART I

Foundations of Data Systems

The first four chapters go through the fundamental ideas that apply to all data sys‐

tems, whether running on a single machine or distributed across a cluster of

machines:

1. Chapter 1 introduces the terminology and approach that we’re going to use

throughout this book. It examines what we actually mean by words like reliabil‐

ity, scalability, and maintainability, and how we can try to achieve these goals.

2. Chapter 2 compares several different data models and query languages—the

most visible distinguishing factor between databases from a developer’s point of

view. We will see how different models are appropriate to different situations.

3. Chapter 3 turns to the internals of storage engines and looks at how databases lay

out data on disk. Different storage engines are optimized for different workloads,

and choosing the right one can have a huge effect on performance.

4. Chapter 4 compares various formats for data encoding (serialization) and espe‐

cially examines how they fare in an environment where application requirements

change and schemas need to adapt over time.

Later, Part II will turn to the particular issues of distributed data systems.

CHAPTER 1

Reliable, Scalable, and

Maintainable Applications

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the

Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a tech‐

nology with a scale like that was so error-free?

—Alan Kay, in interview with Dr Dobb’s Journal (2012) Many applications today are data-intensive, as opposed to compute-intensive. Raw CPU power is rarely a limiting factor for these applications—bigger problems are

usually the amount of data, the complexity of data, and the speed at which it is

changing.

A data-intensive application is typically built from standard building blocks that pro‐

vide commonly needed functionality. For example, many applications need to:

• Store data so that they, or another application, can find it again later ( databases)

• Remember the result of an expensive operation, to speed up reads ( caches)

• Allow users to search data by keyword or filter it in various ways ( search indexes)

• Send a message to another process, to be handled asynchronously ( stream pro‐

cessing)

• Periodically crunch a large amount of accumulated data ( batch processing)

If that sounds painfully obvious, that’s just because these data systems are such a suc‐

cessful abstraction: we use them all the time without thinking too much. When build‐

ing an application, most engineers wouldn’t dream of writing a new data storage

engine from scratch, because databases are a perfectly good tool for the job.

3

But reality is not that simple. There are many database systems with different charac‐

teristics, because different applications have different requirements. There are vari‐

ous approaches to caching, several ways of building search indexes, and so on. When

building an application, we still need to figure out which tools and which approaches

are the most appropriate for the task at hand. And it can be hard to combine tools

when you need to do something that a single tool cannot do alone.

This book is a journey through both the principles and the practicalities of data sys‐

tems, and how you can use them to build data-intensive applications. We will explore

what different tools have in common, what distinguishes them, and how they achieve

their characteristics.

In this chapter, we will start by exploring the fundamentals of what we are trying to

achieve: reliable, scalable, and maintainable data systems. We’ll clarify what those

things mean, outline some ways of thinking about them, and go over the basics that

we will need for later chapters. In the following chapters we will continue layer by

layer, looking at different design decisions that need to be considered when working

on a data-intensive application.

Thinking About Data Systems

We typically think of databases, queues, caches, etc. as being very different categories

of tools. Although a database and a message queue have some superficial similarity—

both store data for some time—they have very different access patterns, which means

different performance characteristics, and thus very different implementations.

So why should we lump them all together under an umbrella term like data systems?

Many new tools for data storage and processing have emerged in recent years. They

are optimized for a variety of different use cases, and they no longer neatly fit into

traditional categories [1]. For example, there are datastores that are also used as mes‐

sage queues (Redis), and there are message queues with database-like durability guar‐

antees (Apache Kafka). The boundaries between the categories are becoming blurred.

Secondly, increasingly many applications now have such demanding or wide-ranging

requirements that a single tool can no longer meet all of its data processing and stor‐

age needs. Instead, the work is broken down into tasks that can be performed effi‐

ciently on a single tool, and those different tools are stitched together using

application code.

For example, if you have an application-managed caching layer (using Memcached

or similar), or a full-text search server (such as Elasticsearch or Solr) separate from

your main database, it is normally the application code’s responsibility to keep those

caches and indexes in sync with the main database. Figure 1-1 gives a glimpse of what

this may look like (we will go into detail in later chapters).

4 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

Figure 1-1. One possible architecture for a data system that combines several

components.

When you combine several tools in order to provide a service, the service’s interface

or application programming interface (API) usually hides those implementation

details from clients. Now you have essentially created a new, special-purpose data

system from smaller, general-purpose components. Your composite data system may

provide certain guarantees: e.g., that the cache will be correctly invalidated or upda‐

ted on writes so that outside clients see consistent results. You are now not only an

application developer, but also a data system designer.

If you are designing a data system or service, a lot of tricky questions arise. How do

you ensure that the data remains correct and complete, even when things go wrong

internally? How do you provide consistently good performance to clients, even when

parts of your system are degraded? How do you scale to handle an increase in load?

What does a good API for the service look like?

There are many factors that may influence the design of a data system, including the

skills and experience of the people involved, legacy system dependencies, the time‐

scale for delivery, your organization’s tolerance of different kinds of risk, regulatory

constraints, etc. Those factors depend very much on the situation.

Thinking About Data Systems | 5

In this book, we focus on three concerns that are important in most software systems:

Reliability

The system should continue to work correctly (performing the correct function at

the desired level of performance) even in the face of adversity (hardware or soft‐

ware faults, and even human error). See “Reliability” on page 6.

Scalability

As the system grows (in data volume, traffic volume, or complexity), there should

be reasonable ways of dealing with that growth. See “Scalability” on page 10.

Maintainability

Over time, many different people will work on the system (engineering and oper‐

ations, both maintaining current behavior and adapting the system to new use

cases), and they should all be able to work on it productively. See “Maintainabil‐

ity” on page 18.

These words are often cast around without a clear understanding of what they mean.

In the interest of thoughtful engineering, we will spend the rest of this chapter

exploring ways of thinking about reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Then, in

the following chapters, we will look at various techniques, architectures, and algo‐

rithms that are used in order to achieve those goals.

Reliability

Everybody has an intuitive idea of what it means for something to be reliable or unre‐

liable. For software, typical expectations include:

• The application performs the function that the user expected.

• It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected

ways.

• Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected

load and data volume.

• The system prevents any unauthorized access and abuse.

If all those things together mean “working correctly,” then we can understand relia‐

bility as meaning, roughly, “continuing to work correctly, even when things go

wrong.”

The things that can go wrong are called faults, and systems that anticipate faults and

can cope with them are called fault-tolerant or resilient. The former term is slightly

misleading: it suggests that we could make a system tolerant of every possible kind of

fault, which in reality is not feasible. If the entire planet Earth (and all servers on it)

were swallowed by a black hole, tolerance of that fault would require web hosting in

6 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

space—good luck getting that budget item approved. So it only makes sense to talk

about tolerating certain types of faults.

Note that a fault is not the same as a failure [2]. A fault is usually defined as one com‐

ponent of the system deviating from its spec, whereas a failure is when the system as a

whole stops providing the required service to the user. It is impossible to reduce the

probability of a fault to zero; therefore it is usually best to design fault-tolerance

mechanisms that prevent faults from causing failures. In this book we cover several

techniques for building reliable systems from unreliable parts.

Counterintuitively, in such fault-tolerant systems, it can make sense to increase the

rate of faults by triggering them deliberately—for example, by randomly killing indi‐

vidual processes without warning. Many critical bugs are actually due to poor error

handling [3]; by deliberately inducing faults, you ensure that the fault-tolerance

machinery is continually exercised and tested, which can increase your confidence

that faults will be handled correctly when they occur naturally. The Netflix Chaos

Monkey [4] is an example of this approach.

Although we generally prefer tolerating faults over preventing faults, there are cases

where prevention is better than cure (e.g., because no cure exists). This is the case

with security matters, for example: if an attacker has compromised a system and

gained access to sensitive data, that event cannot be undone. However, this book

mostly deals with the kinds of faults that can be cured, as described in the following

sections.

Hardware Faults

When we think of causes of system failure, hardware faults quickly come to mind.

Hard disks crash, RAM becomes faulty, the power grid has a blackout, someone

unplugs the wrong network cable. Anyone who has worked with large datacenters

can tell you that these things happen all the time when you have a lot of machines.

Hard disks are reported as having a mean time to failure (MTTF) of about 10 to 50

years [5, 6]. Thus, on a storage cluster with 10,000 disks, we should expect on average one disk to die per day.

Our first response is usually to add redundancy to the individual hardware compo‐

nents in order to reduce the failure rate of the system. Disks may be set up in a RAID

configuration, servers may have dual power supplies and hot-swappable CPUs, and

datacenters may have batteries and diesel generators for backup power. When one

component dies, the redundant component can take its place while the broken com‐

ponent is replaced. This approach cannot completely prevent hardware problems

from causing failures, but it is well understood and can often keep a machine running

uninterrupted for years.

Reliability | 7

Until recently, redundancy of hardware components was sufficient for most applica‐

tions, since it makes total failure of a single machine fairly rare. As long as you can

restore a backup onto a new machine fairly quickly, the downtime in case of failure is

not catastrophic in most applications. Thus, multi-machine redundancy was only

required by a small number of applications for which high availability was absolutely

essential.

However, as data volumes and applications’ computing demands have increased,

more applications have begun using larger numbers of machines, which proportion‐

ally increases the rate of hardware faults. Moreover, in some cloud platforms such as

Amazon Web Services (AWS) it is fairly common for virtual machine instances to

become unavailable without warning [7], as the platforms are designed to prioritize

flexibility and elasticityi over single-machine reliability.

Hence there is a move toward systems that can tolerate the loss of entire machines, by

using software fault-tolerance techniques in preference or in addition to hardware

redundancy. Such systems also have operational advantages: a single-server system

requires planned downtime if you need to reboot the machine (to apply operating

system security patches, for example), whereas a system that can tolerate machine

failure can be patched one node at a time, without downtime of the entire system (a

rolling upgrade; see Chapter 4).

Software Errors

We usually think of hardware faults as being random and independent from each

other: one machine’s disk failing does not imply that another machine’s disk is going

to fail. There may be weak correlations (for example due to a common cause, such as

the temperature in the server rack), but otherwise it is unlikely that a large number of

hardware components will fail at the same time.

Another class of fault is a systematic error within the system [8]. Such faults are

harder to anticipate, and because they are correlated across nodes, they tend to cause

many more system failures than uncorrelated hardware faults [5]. Examples include:

• A software bug that causes every instance of an application server to crash when

given a particular bad input. For example, consider the leap second on June 30,

2012, that caused many applications to hang simultaneously due to a bug in the

Linux kernel [9].

• A runaway process that uses up some shared resource—CPU time, memory, disk

space, or network bandwidth.

i. Defined in “Approaches for Coping with Load” on page 17.

8 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

• A service that the system depends on that slows down, becomes unresponsive, or

starts returning corrupted responses.

• Cascading failures, where a small fault in one component triggers a fault in

another component, which in turn triggers further faults [10].

The bugs that cause these kinds of software faults often lie dormant for a long time

until they are triggered by an unusual set of circumstances. In those circumstances, it

is revealed that the software is making some kind of assumption about its environ‐

ment—and while that assumption is usually true, it eventually stops being true for

some reason [11].

There is no quick solution to the problem of systematic faults in software. Lots of

small things can help: carefully thinking about assumptions and interactions in the

system; thorough testing; process isolation; allowing processes to crash and restart;

measuring, monitoring, and analyzing system behavior in production. If a system is

expected to provide some guarantee (for example, in a message queue, that the num‐

ber of incoming messages equals the number of outgoing messages), it can constantly

check itself while it is running and raise an alert if a discrepancy is found [12].

Human Errors

Humans design and build software systems, and the operators who keep the systems

running are also human. Even when they have the best intentions, humans are

known to be unreliable. For example, one study of large internet services found that

configuration errors by operators were the leading cause of outages, whereas hard‐

ware faults (servers or network) played a role in only 10–25% of outages [13].

How do we make our systems reliable, in spite of unreliable humans? The best sys‐

tems combine several approaches:

• Design systems in a way that minimizes opportunities for error. For example,

well-designed abstractions, APIs, and admin interfaces make it easy to do “the

right thing” and discourage “the wrong thing.” However, if the interfaces are too

restrictive people will work around them, negating their benefit, so this is a tricky

balance to get right.

• Decouple the places where people make the most mistakes from the places where

they can cause failures. In particular, provide fully featured non-production

sandbox environments where people can explore and experiment safely, using

real data, without affecting real users.

• Test thoroughly at all levels, from unit tests to whole-system integration tests and

manual tests [3]. Automated testing is widely used, well understood, and espe‐

cially valuable for covering corner cases that rarely arise in normal operation.

Reliability | 9

• Allow quick and easy recovery from human errors, to minimize the impact in the

case of a failure. For example, make it fast to roll back configuration changes, roll

out new code gradually (so that any unexpected bugs affect only a small subset of

users), and provide tools to recompute data (in case it turns out that the old com‐

putation was incorrect).

• Set up detailed and clear monitoring, such as performance metrics and error

rates. In other engineering disciplines this is referred to as telemetry. (Once a

rocket has left the ground, telemetry is essential for tracking what is happening,

and for understanding failures [14].) Monitoring can show us early warning sig‐

nals and allow us to check whether any assumptions or constraints are being vio‐

lated. When a problem occurs, metrics can be invaluable in diagnosing the issue.

• Implement good management practices and training—a complex and important

aspect, and beyond the scope of this book.

How Important Is Reliability?

Reliability is not just for nuclear power stations and air traffic control software—

more mundane applications are also expected to work reliably. Bugs in business

applications cause lost productivity (and legal risks if figures are reported incor‐

rectly), and outages of ecommerce sites can have huge costs in terms of lost revenue

and damage to reputation.

Even in “noncritical” applications we have a responsibility to our users. Consider a

parent who stores all their pictures and videos of their children in your photo appli‐

cation [15]. How would they feel if that database was suddenly corrupted? Would

they know how to restore it from a backup?

There are situations in which we may choose to sacrifice reliability in order to reduce

development cost (e.g., when developing a prototype product for an unproven mar‐

ket) or operational cost (e.g., for a service with a very narrow profit margin)—but we

should be very conscious of when we are cutting corners.

Scalability

Even if a system is working reliably today, that doesn’t mean it will necessarily work

reliably in the future. One common reason for degradation is increased load: perhaps

the system has grown from 10,000 concurrent users to 100,000 concurrent users, or

from 1 million to 10 million. Perhaps it is processing much larger volumes of data

than it did before.

Scalability is the term we use to describe a system’s ability to cope with increased

load. Note, however, that it is not a one-dimensional label that we can attach to a sys‐

tem: it is meaningless to say “X is scalable” or “Y doesn’t scale.” Rather, discussing

10 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

scalability means considering questions like “If the system grows in a particular way,

what are our options for coping with the growth?” and “How can we add computing

resources to handle the additional load?”

Describing Load

First, we need to succinctly describe the current load on the system; only then can we

discuss growth questions (what happens if our load doubles?). Load can be described

with a few numbers which we call load parameters. The best choice of parameters

depends on the architecture of your system: it may be requests per second to a web

server, the ratio of reads to writes in a database, the number of simultaneously active

users in a chat room, the hit rate on a cache, or something else. Perhaps the average

case is what matters for you, or perhaps your bottleneck is dominated by a small

number of extreme cases.

To make this idea more concrete, let’s consider Twitter as an example, using data

published in November 2012 [16]. Two of Twitter’s main operations are:

Post tweet

A user can publish a new message to their followers (4.6k requests/sec on aver‐

age, over 12k requests/sec at peak).

Home timeline

A user can view tweets posted by the people they follow (300k requests/sec).

Simply handling 12,000 writes per second (the peak rate for posting tweets) would be

fairly easy. However, Twitter’s scaling challenge is not primarily due to tweet volume,

but due to fan-out ii—each user follows many people, and each user is followed by

many people. There are broadly two ways of implementing these two operations:

1. Posting a tweet simply inserts the new tweet into a global collection of tweets.

When a user requests their home timeline, look up all the people they follow,

find all the tweets for each of those users, and merge them (sorted by time). In a

relational database like in Figure 1-2, you could write a query such as:

SELECT tweets.*, users.* FROM tweets

JOIN users ON tweets.sender_id = users.id

JOIN follows ON follows.followee_id = users.id

WHERE follows.follower_id = current_user

ii. A term borrowed from electronic engineering, where it describes the number of logic gate inputs that are attached to another gate’s output. The output needs to supply enough current to drive all the attached inputs.

In transaction processing systems, we use it to describe the number of requests to other services that we need to make in order to serve one incoming request.

Scalability | 11

2. Maintain a cache for each user’s home timeline—like a mailbox of tweets for

each recipient user (see Figure 1-3). When a user posts a tweet, look up all the people who follow that user, and insert the new tweet into each of their home timeline caches. The request to read the home timeline is then cheap, because its

result has been computed ahead of time.

Figure 1-2. Simple relational schema for implementing a Twitter home timeline.

Figure 1-3. Twitter’s data pipeline for delivering tweets to followers, with load parame‐

ters as of November 2012 [16 ].

The first version of Twitter used approach 1, but the systems struggled to keep up

with the load of home timeline queries, so the company switched to approach 2. This

works better because the average rate of published tweets is almost two orders of

magnitude lower than the rate of home timeline reads, and so in this case it’s prefera‐

ble to do more work at write time and less at read time.

However, the downside of approach 2 is that posting a tweet now requires a lot of

extra work. On average, a tweet is delivered to about 75 followers, so 4.6k tweets per

second become 345k writes per second to the home timeline caches. But this average

hides the fact that the number of followers per user varies wildly, and some users

12 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

have over 30 million followers. This means that a single tweet may result in over 30

million writes to home timelines! Doing this in a timely manner—Twitter tries to

deliver tweets to followers within five seconds—is a significant challenge.

In the example of Twitter, the distribution of followers per user (maybe weighted by

how often those users tweet) is a key load parameter for discussing scalability, since it

determines the fan-out load. Your application may have very different characteristics,

but you can apply similar principles to reasoning about its load.

The final twist of the Twitter anecdote: now that approach 2 is robustly implemented,

Twitter is moving to a hybrid of both approaches. Most users’ tweets continue to be

fanned out to home timelines at the time when they are posted, but a small number

of users with a very large number of followers (i.e., celebrities) are excepted from this

fan-out. Tweets from any celebrities that a user may follow are fetched separately and

merged with that user’s home timeline when it is read, like in approach 1. This hybrid

approach is able to deliver consistently good performance. We will revisit this exam‐

ple in Chapter 12 after we have covered some more technical ground.

Describing Performance

Once you have described the load on your system, you can investigate what happens

when the load increases. You can look at it in two ways:

• When you increase a load parameter and keep the system resources (CPU, mem‐

ory, network bandwidth, etc.) unchanged, how is the performance of your system

affected?

• When you increase a load parameter, how much do you need to increase the

resources if you want to keep performance unchanged?

Both questions require performance numbers, so let’s look briefly at describing the

performance of a system.

In a batch processing system such as Hadoop, we usually care about throughput—the

number of records we can process per second, or the total time it takes to run a job

on a dataset of a certain size.iii In online systems, what’s usually more important is the

service’s response time—that is, the time between a client sending a request and

receiving a response.

iii. In an ideal world, the running time of a batch job is the size of the dataset divided by the throughput. In practice, the running time is often longer, due to skew (data not being spread evenly across worker processes) and needing to wait for the slowest task to complete.

Scalability | 13

Latency and response time

Latency and response time are often used synonymously, but they

are not the same. The response time is what the client sees: besides

the actual time to process the request (the service time), it includes

network delays and queueing delays. Latency is the duration that a

request is waiting to be handled—during which it is latent, await‐

ing service [17].

Even if you only make the same request over and over again, you’ll get a slightly dif‐

ferent response time on every try. In practice, in a system handling a variety of

requests, the response time can vary a lot. We therefore need to think of response

time not as a single number, but as a distribution of values that you can measure.

In Figure 1-4, each gray bar represents a request to a service, and its height shows

how long that request took. Most requests are reasonably fast, but there are occa‐

sional outliers that take much longer. Perhaps the slow requests are intrinsically more

expensive, e.g., because they process more data. But even in a scenario where you’d

think all requests should take the same time, you get variation: random additional

latency could be introduced by a context switch to a background process, the loss of a

network packet and TCP retransmission, a garbage collection pause, a page fault

forcing a read from disk, mechanical vibrations in the server rack [18], or many other

causes.

Figure 1-4. Illustrating mean and percentiles: response times for a sample of 100

requests to a service.

It’s common to see the average response time of a service reported. (Strictly speaking,

the term “average” doesn’t refer to any particular formula, but in practice it is usually

understood as the arithmetic mean: given n values, add up all the values, and divide

by n.) However, the mean is not a very good metric if you want to know your “typi‐

cal” response time, because it doesn’t tell you how many users actually experienced

that delay.

Usually it is better to use percentiles. If you take your list of response times and sort it

from fastest to slowest, then the median is the halfway point: for example, if your

14 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

median response time is 200 ms, that means half your requests return in less than

200 ms, and half your requests take longer than that.

This makes the median a good metric if you want to know how long users typically

have to wait: half of user requests are served in less than the median response time,

and the other half take longer than the median. The median is also known as the 50th

percentile, and sometimes abbreviated as p50. Note that the median refers to a single

request; if the user makes several requests (over the course of a session, or because

several resources are included in a single page), the probability that at least one of

them is slower than the median is much greater than 50%.

In order to figure out how bad your outliers are, you can look at higher percentiles:

the 95th, 99th, and 99.9th percentiles are common (abbreviated p95, p99, and p999).

They are the response time thresholds at which 95%, 99%, or 99.9% of requests are

faster than that particular threshold. For example, if the 95th percentile response time

is 1.5 seconds, that means 95 out of 100 requests take less than 1.5 seconds, and 5 out

of 100 requests take 1.5 seconds or more. This is illustrated in Figure 1-4.

High percentiles of response times, also known as tail latencies, are important

because they directly affect users’ experience of the service. For example, Amazon

describes response time requirements for internal services in terms of the 99.9th per‐

centile, even though it only affects 1 in 1,000 requests. This is because the customers

with the slowest requests are often those who have the most data on their accounts

because they have made many purchases—that is, they’re the most valuable custom‐

ers [19]. It’s important to keep those customers happy by ensuring the website is fast

for them: Amazon has also observed that a 100 ms increase in response time reduces

sales by 1% [20], and others report that a 1-second slowdown reduces a customer sat‐

isfaction metric by 16% [21, 22].

On the other hand, optimizing the 99.99th percentile (the slowest 1 in 10,000

requests) was deemed too expensive and to not yield enough benefit for Amazon’s

purposes. Reducing response times at very high percentiles is difficult because they

are easily affected by random events outside of your control, and the benefits are

diminishing.

For example, percentiles are often used in service level objectives (SLOs) and service

level agreements (SLAs), contracts that define the expected performance and availa‐

bility of a service. An SLA may state that the service is considered to be up if it has a

median response time of less than 200 ms and a 99th percentile under 1 s (if the

response time is longer, it might as well be down), and the service may be required to

be up at least 99.9% of the time. These metrics set expectations for clients of the ser‐

vice and allow customers to demand a refund if the SLA is not met.

Queueing delays often account for a large part of the response time at high percen‐

tiles. As a server can only process a small number of things in parallel (limited, for

Scalability | 15

example, by its number of CPU cores), it only takes a small number of slow requests

to hold up the processing of subsequent requests—an effect sometimes known as

head-of-line blocking. Even if those subsequent requests are fast to process on the

server, the client will see a slow overall response time due to the time waiting for the

prior request to complete. Due to this effect, it is important to measure response

times on the client side.

When generating load artificially in order to test the scalability of a system, the load-

generating client needs to keep sending requests independently of the response time.

If the client waits for the previous request to complete before sending the next one,

that behavior has the effect of artificially keeping the queues shorter in the test than

they would be in reality, which skews the measurements [23].

Percentiles in Practice

High percentiles become especially important in backend services that are called mul‐

tiple times as part of serving a single end-user request. Even if you make the calls in

parallel, the end-user request still needs to wait for the slowest of the parallel calls to

complete. It takes just one slow call to make the entire end-user request slow, as illus‐

trated in Figure 1-5. Even if only a small percentage of backend calls are slow, the

chance of getting a slow call increases if an end-user request requires multiple back‐

end calls, and so a higher proportion of end-user requests end up being slow (an

effect known as tail latency amplification [24]).

If you want to add response time percentiles to the monitoring dashboards for your

services, you need to efficiently calculate them on an ongoing basis. For example, you

may want to keep a rolling window of response times of requests in the last 10

minutes. Every minute, you calculate the median and various percentiles over the val‐

ues in that window and plot those metrics on a graph.

The naïve implementation is to keep a list of response times for all requests within the

time window and to sort that list every minute. If that is too inefficient for you, there

are algorithms that can calculate a good approximation of percentiles at minimal

CPU and memory cost, such as forward decay [25], t-digest [26], or HdrHistogram

[27]. Beware that averaging percentiles, e.g., to reduce the time resolution or to com‐

bine data from several machines, is mathematically meaningless—the right way of

aggregating response time data is to add the histograms [28].

16 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

Figure 1-5. When several backend calls are needed to serve a request, it takes just a sin‐

gle slow backend request to slow down the entire end-user request.

Approaches for Coping with Load

Now that we have discussed the parameters for describing load and metrics for meas‐

uring performance, we can start discussing scalability in earnest: how do we maintain

good performance even when our load parameters increase by some amount?

An architecture that is appropriate for one level of load is unlikely to cope with 10

times that load. If you are working on a fast-growing service, it is therefore likely that

you will need to rethink your architecture on every order of magnitude load increase

—or perhaps even more often than that.

People often talk of a dichotomy between scaling up ( vertical scaling, moving to a

more powerful machine) and scaling out ( horizontal scaling, distributing the load

across multiple smaller machines). Distributing load across multiple machines is also

known as a shared-nothing architecture. A system that can run on a single machine is

often simpler, but high-end machines can become very expensive, so very intensive

workloads often can’t avoid scaling out. In reality, good architectures usually involve

a pragmatic mixture of approaches: for example, using several fairly powerful

machines can still be simpler and cheaper than a large number of small virtual

machines.

Some systems are elastic, meaning that they can automatically add computing resour‐

ces when they detect a load increase, whereas other systems are scaled manually (a

human analyzes the capacity and decides to add more machines to the system). An

elastic system can be useful if load is highly unpredictable, but manually scaled sys‐

tems are simpler and may have fewer operational surprises (see “Rebalancing Parti‐

tions” on page 209).

Scalability | 17

While distributing stateless services across multiple machines is fairly straightfor‐

ward, taking stateful data systems from a single node to a distributed setup can intro‐

duce a lot of additional complexity. For this reason, common wisdom until recently

was to keep your database on a single node (scale up) until scaling cost or high-

availability requirements forced you to make it distributed.

As the tools and abstractions for distributed systems get better, this common wisdom

may change, at least for some kinds of applications. It is conceivable that distributed

data systems will become the default in the future, even for use cases that don’t han‐

dle large volumes of data or traffic. Over the course of the rest of this book we will

cover many kinds of distributed data systems, and discuss how they fare not just in

terms of scalability, but also ease of use and maintainability.

The architecture of systems that operate at large scale is usually highly specific to the

application—there is no such thing as a generic, one-size-fits-all scalable architecture

(informally known as magic scaling sauce). The problem may be the volume of reads,

the volume of writes, the volume of data to store, the complexity of the data, the

response time requirements, the access patterns, or (usually) some mixture of all of

these plus many more issues.

For example, a system that is designed to handle 100,000 requests per second, each

1 kB in size, looks very different from a system that is designed for 3 requests per

minute, each 2 GB in size—even though the two systems have the same data through‐

put.

An architecture that scales well for a particular application is built around assump‐

tions of which operations will be common and which will be rare—the load parame‐

ters. If those assumptions turn out to be wrong, the engineering effort for scaling is at

best wasted, and at worst counterproductive. In an early-stage startup or an unpro‐

ven product it’s usually more important to be able to iterate quickly on product fea‐

tures than it is to scale to some hypothetical future load.

Even though they are specific to a particular application, scalable architectures are

nevertheless usually built from general-purpose building blocks, arranged in familiar

patterns. In this book we discuss those building blocks and patterns.

Maintainability

It is well known that the majority of the cost of software is not in its initial develop‐

ment, but in its ongoing maintenance—fixing bugs, keeping its systems operational,

investigating failures, adapting it to new platforms, modifying it for new use cases,

repaying technical debt, and adding new features.

Yet, unfortunately, many people working on software systems dislike maintenance of

so-called legacy systems—perhaps it involves fixing other people’s mistakes, or work‐

18 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

ing with platforms that are now outdated, or systems that were forced to do things

they were never intended for. Every legacy system is unpleasant in its own way, and

so it is difficult to give general recommendations for dealing with them.

However, we can and should design software in such a way that it will hopefully min‐

imize pain during maintenance, and thus avoid creating legacy software ourselves. To

this end, we will pay particular attention to three design principles for software

systems:

Operability

Make it easy for operations teams to keep the system running smoothly.

Simplicity

Make it easy for new engineers to understand the system, by removing as much

complexity as possible from the system. (Note this is not the same as simplicity

of the user interface.)

Evolvability

Make it easy for engineers to make changes to the system in the future, adapting

it for unanticipated use cases as requirements change. Also known as extensibil‐

ity, modifiability, or plasticity.

As previously with reliability and scalability, there are no easy solutions for achieving

these goals. Rather, we will try to think about systems with operability, simplicity,

and evolvability in mind.

Operability: Making Life Easy for Operations

It has been suggested that “good operations can often work around the limitations of

bad (or incomplete) software, but good software cannot run reliably with bad opera‐

tions” [12]. While some aspects of operations can and should be automated, it is still

up to humans to set up that automation in the first place and to make sure it’s work‐

ing correctly.

Operations teams are vital to keeping a software system running smoothly. A good

operations team typically is responsible for the following, and more [29]:

• Monitoring the health of the system and quickly restoring service if it goes into a

bad state

• Tracking down the cause of problems, such as system failures or degraded per‐

formance

• Keeping software and platforms up to date, including security patches

• Keeping tabs on how different systems affect each other, so that a problematic

change can be avoided before it causes damage

Maintainability | 19

• Anticipating future problems and solving them before they occur (e.g., capacity

planning)

• Establishing good practices and tools for deployment, configuration manage‐

ment, and more

• Performing complex maintenance tasks, such as moving an application from one

platform to another

• Maintaining the security of the system as configuration changes are made

• Defining processes that make operations predictable and help keep the produc‐

tion environment stable

• Preserving the organization’s knowledge about the system, even as individual

people come and go

Good operability means making routine tasks easy, allowing the operations team to

focus their efforts on high-value activities. Data systems can do various things to

make routine tasks easy, including:

• Providing visibility into the runtime behavior and internals of the system, with

good monitoring

• Providing good support for automation and integration with standard tools

• Avoiding dependency on individual machines (allowing machines to be taken

down for maintenance while the system as a whole continues running uninter‐

rupted)

• Providing good documentation and an easy-to-understand operational model

(“If I do X, Y will happen”)

• Providing good default behavior, but also giving administrators the freedom to

override defaults when needed

• Self-healing where appropriate, but also giving administrators manual control

over the system state when needed

• Exhibiting predictable behavior, minimizing surprises

Simplicity: Managing Complexity

Small software projects can have delightfully simple and expressive code, but as

projects get larger, they often become very complex and difficult to understand. This

complexity slows down everyone who needs to work on the system, further increas‐

ing the cost of maintenance. A software project mired in complexity is sometimes

described as a big ball of mud [30].

20 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

There are various possible symptoms of complexity: explosion of the state space, tight

coupling of modules, tangled dependencies, inconsistent naming and terminology,

hacks aimed at solving performance problems, special-casing to work around issues

elsewhere, and many more. Much has been said on this topic already [31, 32, 33].

When complexity makes maintenance hard, budgets and schedules are often over‐

run. In complex software, there is also a greater risk of introducing bugs when mak‐

ing a change: when the system is harder for developers to understand and reason

about, hidden assumptions, unintended consequences, and unexpected interactions

are more easily overlooked. Conversely, reducing complexity greatly improves the

maintainability of software, and thus simplicity should be a key goal for the systems

we build.

Making a system simpler does not necessarily mean reducing its functionality; it can

also mean removing accidental complexity. Moseley and Marks [32] define complex‐

ity as accidental if it is not inherent in the problem that the software solves (as seen

by the users) but arises only from the implementation.

One of the best tools we have for removing accidental complexity is abstraction. A

good abstraction can hide a great deal of implementation detail behind a clean,

simple-to-understand façade. A good abstraction can also be used for a wide range of

different applications. Not only is this reuse more efficient than reimplementing a

similar thing multiple times, but it also leads to higher-quality software, as quality

improvements in the abstracted component benefit all applications that use it.

For example, high-level programming languages are abstractions that hide machine

code, CPU registers, and syscalls. SQL is an abstraction that hides complex on-disk

and in-memory data structures, concurrent requests from other clients, and inconsis‐

tencies after crashes. Of course, when programming in a high-level language, we are

still using machine code; we are just not using it directly, because the programming

language abstraction saves us from having to think about it.

However, finding good abstractions is very hard. In the field of distributed systems,

although there are many good algorithms, it is much less clear how we should be

packaging them into abstractions that help us keep the complexity of the system at a

manageable level.

Throughout this book, we will keep our eyes open for good abstractions that allow us

to extract parts of a large system into well-defined, reusable components.

Evolvability: Making Change Easy

It’s extremely unlikely that your system’s requirements will remain unchanged for‐

ever. They are much more likely to be in constant flux: you learn new facts, previ‐

ously unanticipated use cases emerge, business priorities change, users request new

Maintainability | 21

features, new platforms replace old platforms, legal or regulatory requirements

change, growth of the system forces architectural changes, etc.

In terms of organizational processes, Agile working patterns provide a framework for

adapting to change. The Agile community has also developed technical tools and pat‐

terns that are helpful when developing software in a frequently changing environ‐

ment, such as test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring.

Most discussions of these Agile techniques focus on a fairly small, local scale (a cou‐

ple of source code files within the same application). In this book, we search for ways

of increasing agility on the level of a larger data system, perhaps consisting of several

different applications or services with different characteristics. For example, how

would you “refactor” Twitter’s architecture for assembling home timelines (“Describ‐

ing Load” on page 11) from approach 1 to approach 2?

The ease with which you can modify a data system, and adapt it to changing require‐

ments, is closely linked to its simplicity and its abstractions: simple and easy-to-

understand systems are usually easier to modify than complex ones. But since this is

such an important idea, we will use a different word to refer to agility on a data sys‐

tem level: evolvability [34].

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored some fundamental ways of thinking about data-

intensive applications. These principles will guide us through the rest of the book,

where we dive into deep technical detail.

An application has to meet various requirements in order to be useful. There are

functional requirements (what it should do, such as allowing data to be stored,

retrieved, searched, and processed in various ways), and some nonfunctional require‐

ments (general properties like security, reliability, compliance, scalability, compatibil‐

ity, and maintainability). In this chapter we discussed reliability, scalability, and

maintainability in detail.

Reliability means making systems work correctly, even when faults occur. Faults can

be in hardware (typically random and uncorrelated), software (bugs are typically sys‐

tematic and hard to deal with), and humans (who inevitably make mistakes from

time to time). Fault-tolerance techniques can hide certain types of faults from the end

user.

Scalability means having strategies for keeping performance good, even when load

increases. In order to discuss scalability, we first need ways of describing load and

performance quantitatively. We briefly looked at Twitter’s home timelines as an

example of describing load, and response time percentiles as a way of measuring per‐

22 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

formance. In a scalable system, you can add processing capacity in order to remain

reliable under high load.

Maintainability has many facets, but in essence it’s about making life better for the

engineering and operations teams who need to work with the system. Good abstrac‐

tions can help reduce complexity and make the system easier to modify and adapt for

new use cases. Good operability means having good visibility into the system’s health,

and having effective ways of managing it.

There is unfortunately no easy fix for making applications reliable, scalable, or main‐

tainable. However, there are certain patterns and techniques that keep reappearing in

different kinds of applications. In the next few chapters we will take a look at some

examples of data systems and analyze how they work toward those goals.

Later in the book, in Part III, we will look at patterns for systems that consist of several components working together, such as the one in Figure 1-1.

References

[1] Michael Stonebraker and Uğur Çetintemel: “‘One Size Fits All’: An Idea Whose

Time Has Come and Gone,” at 21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2005.

[2] Walter L. Heimerdinger and Charles B. Weinstock: “A Conceptual Framework

for System Fault Tolerance,” Technical Report CMU/SEI-92-TR-033, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, October 1992.

[3] Ding Yuan, Yu Luo, Xin Zhuang, et al.: “Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Criti‐

cal Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Sys‐

tems,” at 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), October 2014.

[4] Yury Izrailevsky and Ariel Tseitlin: “The Netflix Simian Army,” techblog.netflix.com, July 19, 2011.

[5] Daniel Ford, François Labelle, Florentina I. Popovici, et al.: “Availability in Glob‐

ally Distributed Storage Systems,” at 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), October 2010.

[6] Brian Beach: “Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014,” backblaze.com, September 23, 2014.

[7] Laurie Voss: “AWS: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” blog.awe.sm, December 18, 2012.

Summary | 23

[8] Haryadi S. Gunawi, Mingzhe Hao, Tanakorn Leesatapornwongsa, et al.: “What

Bugs Live in the Cloud?,” at 5th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC), November 2014. doi:10.1145/2670979.2670986

[9] Nelson Minar: “Leap Second Crashes Half the Internet,” somebits.com, July 3, 2012.

[10] Amazon Web Services: “Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Ser‐

vice Disruption in the US East Region,” aws.amazon.com, April 29, 2011.

[11] Richard I. Cook: “How Complex Systems Fail,” Cognitive Technologies Labora‐

tory, April 2000.

[12] Jay Kreps: “Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability,” blog.empathybox.com, March 19, 2012.

[13] David Oppenheimer, Archana Ganapathi, and David A. Patterson: “Why Do

Internet Services Fail, and What Can Be Done About It? ,” at 4th USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS), March 2003.

[14] Nathan Marz: “Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1,” nathanmarz.com, April 2, 2013.

[15] Michael Jurewitz: “The Human Impact of Bugs,” jury.me, March 15, 2013.

[16] Raffi Krikorian: “Timelines at Scale,” at QCon San Francisco, November 2012.

[17] Martin Fowler: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Addison Wesley, 2002. ISBN: 978-0-321-12742-6

[18] Kelly Sommers: “After all that run around, what caused 500ms disk latency even

when we replaced physical server? ” twitter.com, November 13, 2014.

[19] Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, et al.: “Dynamo: Ama‐

zon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store,” at 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), October 2007.

[20] Greg Linden: “Make Data Useful,” slides from presentation at Stanford University Data Mining class (CS345), December 2006.

[21] Tammy Everts: “The Real Cost of Slow Time vs Downtime,” webperformancetoday.com, November 12, 2014.

[22] Jake Brutlag: “Speed Matters for Google Web Search,” googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk, June 22, 2009.

[23] Tyler Treat: “Everything You Know About Latency Is Wrong,” bravenewgeek.com, December 12, 2015.

24 | Chapter 1: Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

[24] Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso: “The Tail at Scale,” Communications of the ACM, volume 56, number 2, pages 74–80, February 2013. doi:

10.1145/2408776.2408794

[25] Graham Cormode, Vladislav Shkapenyuk, Divesh Srivastava, and Bojian Xu:

“Forward Decay: A Practical Time Decay Model for Streaming Systems,” at 25th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), March 2009.

[26] Ted Dunning and Otmar Ertl: “Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using

t-Digests,” github.com, March 2014.

[27] Gil Tene: “HdrHistogram,” hdrhistogram.org.

[28] Baron Schwartz: “Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way You Think,” vividcortex.com, December 7, 2015.

[29] James Hamilton: “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services,” at 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA), November 2007.

[30] Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder: “Big Ball of Mud,” at 4th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP), September 1997.

[31] Frederick P Brooks: “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engi‐

neering,” in The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary edition, Addison-Wesley, 1995.

ISBN: 978-0-201-83595-3

[32] Ben Moseley and Peter Marks: “Out of the Tar Pit,” at BCS Software Practice Advancement (SPA), 2006.

[33] Rich Hickey: “Simple Made Easy,” at Strange Loop, September 2011.

[34] Hongyu Pei Breivold, Ivica Crnkovic, and Peter J. Eriksson: “Analyzing Software

Evolvability,” at 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), July 2008. doi:10.1109/COMPSAC.2008.50

Summary | 25

CHAPTER 2

Data Models and Query Languages

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Data models are perhaps the most important part of developing software, because

they have such a profound effect: not only on how the software is written, but also on

how we think about the problem that we are solving.

Most applications are built by layering one data model on top of another. For each

layer, the key question is: how is it represented in terms of the next-lower layer? For

example:

1. As an application developer, you look at the real world (in which there are peo‐

ple, organizations, goods, actions, money flows, sensors, etc.) and model it in

terms of objects or data structures, and APIs that manipulate those data struc‐

tures. Those structures are often specific to your application.

2. When you want to store those data structures, you express them in terms of a

general-purpose data model, such as JSON or XML documents, tables in a rela‐

tional database, or a graph model.

3. The engineers who built your database software decided on a way of representing

that JSON/XML/relational/graph data in terms of bytes in memory, on disk, or

on a network. The representation may allow the data to be queried, searched,

manipulated, and processed in various ways.

4. On yet lower levels, hardware engineers have figured out how to represent bytes

in terms of electrical currents, pulses of light, magnetic fields, and more.

In a complex application there may be more intermediary levels, such as APIs built

upon APIs, but the basic idea is still the same: each layer hides the complexity of the

layers below it by providing a clean data model. These abstractions allow different

27

groups of people—for example, the engineers at the database vendor and the applica‐

tion developers using their database—to work together effectively.

There are many different kinds of data models, and every data model embodies

assumptions about how it is going to be used. Some kinds of usage are easy and some

are not supported; some operations are fast and some perform badly; some data

transformations feel natural and some are awkward.

It can take a lot of effort to master just one data model (think how many books there

are on relational data modeling). Building software is hard enough, even when work‐

ing with just one data model and without worrying about its inner workings. But

since the data model has such a profound effect on what the software above it can

and can’t do, it’s important to choose one that is appropriate to the application.

In this chapter we will look at a range of general-purpose data models for data stor‐

age and querying (point 2 in the preceding list). In particular, we will compare the

relational model, the document model, and a few graph-based data models. We will

also look at various query languages and compare their use cases. In Chapter 3 we

will discuss how storage engines work; that is, how these data models are actually

implemented (point 3 in the list).

Relational Model Versus Document Model

The best-known data model today is probably that of SQL, based on the relational

model proposed by Edgar Codd in 1970 [1]: data is organized into relations (called tables in SQL), where each relation is an unordered collection of tuples ( rows in SQL).

The relational model was a theoretical proposal, and many people at the time

doubted whether it could be implemented efficiently. However, by the mid-1980s,

relational database management systems (RDBMSes) and SQL had become the tools

of choice for most people who needed to store and query data with some kind of reg‐

ular structure. The dominance of relational databases has lasted around 25‒30 years

—an eternity in computing history.

The roots of relational databases lie in business data processing, which was performed

on mainframe computers in the 1960s and ’70s. The use cases appear mundane from

today’s perspective: typically transaction processing (entering sales or banking trans‐

actions, airline reservations, stock-keeping in warehouses) and batch processing (cus‐

tomer invoicing, payroll, reporting).

Other databases at that time forced application developers to think a lot about the

internal representation of the data in the database. The goal of the relational model

was to hide that implementation detail behind a cleaner interface.

Over the years, there have been many competing approaches to data storage and

querying. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the network model and the hierarchical model

28 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

were the main alternatives, but the relational model came to dominate them. Object

databases came and went again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. XML databases

appeared in the early 2000s, but have only seen niche adoption. Each competitor to

the relational model generated a lot of hype in its time, but it never lasted [2].

As computers became vastly more powerful and networked, they started being used

for increasingly diverse purposes. And remarkably, relational databases turned out to

generalize very well, beyond their original scope of business data processing, to a

broad variety of use cases. Much of what you see on the web today is still powered by

relational databases, be it online publishing, discussion, social networking, ecom‐

merce, games, software-as-a-service productivity applications, or much more.

The Birth of NoSQL

Now, in the 2010s, NoSQL is the latest attempt to overthrow the relational model’s

dominance. The name “NoSQL” is unfortunate, since it doesn’t actually refer to any

particular technology—it was originally intended simply as a catchy Twitter hashtag

for a meetup on open source, distributed, nonrelational databases in 2009 [3]. Never‐

theless, the term struck a nerve and quickly spread through the web startup commu‐

nity and beyond. A number of interesting database systems are now associated with

the #NoSQL hashtag, and it has been retroactively reinterpreted as Not Only SQL [4].

There are several driving forces behind the adoption of NoSQL databases, including:

• A need for greater scalability than relational databases can easily achieve, includ‐

ing very large datasets or very high write throughput

• A widespread preference for free and open source software over commercial

database products

• Specialized query operations that are not well supported by the relational model

• Frustration with the restrictiveness of relational schemas, and a desire for a more

dynamic and expressive data model [5]

Different applications have different requirements, and the best choice of technology

for one use case may well be different from the best choice for another use case. It

therefore seems likely that in the foreseeable future, relational databases will continue

to be used alongside a broad variety of nonrelational datastores—an idea that is

sometimes called polyglot persistence [3].

The Object-Relational Mismatch

Most application development today is done in object-oriented programming lan‐

guages, which leads to a common criticism of the SQL data model: if data is stored in

relational tables, an awkward translation layer is required between the objects in the

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 29

application code and the database model of tables, rows, and columns. The discon‐

nect between the models is sometimes called an impedance mismatch.i

Object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks like ActiveRecord and Hibernate

reduce the amount of boilerplate code required for this translation layer, but they

can’t completely hide the differences between the two models.

For example, Figure 2-1 illustrates how a résumé (a LinkedIn profile) could be

expressed in a relational schema. The profile as a whole can be identified by a unique

identifier, user_id. Fields like first_name and last_name appear exactly once per

user, so they can be modeled as columns on the users table. However, most people

have had more than one job in their career (positions), and people may have varying

numbers of periods of education and any number of pieces of contact information.

There is a one-to-many relationship from the user to these items, which can be repre‐

sented in various ways:

• In the traditional SQL model (prior to SQL:1999), the most common normalized

representation is to put positions, education, and contact information in separate

tables, with a foreign key reference to the users table, as in Figure 2-1.

• Later versions of the SQL standard added support for structured datatypes and

XML data; this allowed multi-valued data to be stored within a single row, with

support for querying and indexing inside those documents. These features are

supported to varying degrees by Oracle, IBM DB2, MS SQL Server, and Post‐

greSQL [6, 7]. A JSON datatype is also supported by several databases, including

IBM DB2, MySQL, and PostgreSQL [8].

• A third option is to encode jobs, education, and contact info as a JSON or XML

document, store it on a text column in the database, and let the application inter‐

pret its structure and content. In this setup, you typically cannot use the database

to query for values inside that encoded column.

i. A term borrowed from electronics. Every electric circuit has a certain impedance (resistance to alternating current) on its inputs and outputs. When you connect one circuit’s output to another one’s input, the power transfer across the connection is maximized if the output and input impedances of the two circuits match. An impedance mismatch can lead to signal reflections and other troubles.

30 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Figure 2-1. Representing a LinkedIn profile using a relational schema. Photo of Bill

Gates courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Ricardo Stuckert, Agência Brasil.

For a data structure like a résumé, which is mostly a self-contained document, a JSON

representation can be quite appropriate: see Example 2-1. JSON has the appeal of

being much simpler than XML. Document-oriented databases like MongoDB [9],

RethinkDB [10], CouchDB [11], and Espresso [12] support this data model.

Example 2-1. Representing a LinkedIn profile as a JSON document

{

"user_id" : 251,

"first_name" : "Bill",

"last_name" : "Gates",

"summary" : "Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates... Active blogger.",

"region_id" : "us:91",

"industry_id" : 131,

"photo_url" : "/p/7/000/253/05b/308dd6e.jpg",

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 31

"positions" : [

{"job_title" : "Co-chair", "organization" : "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation"}, {"job_title" : "Co-founder, Chairman", "organization" : "Microsoft"}

],

"education" : [

{"school_name" : "Harvard University", "start" : 1973, "end" : 1975}, {"school_name" : "Lakeside School, Seattle", "start" : null, "end" : null}

],

"contact_info" : {

"blog" : "http://thegatesnotes.com",

"twitter" : "http://twitter.com/BillGates"

}

}

Some developers feel that the JSON model reduces the impedance mismatch between

the application code and the storage layer. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4,

there are also problems with JSON as a data encoding format. The lack of a schema is

often cited as an advantage; we will discuss this in “Schema flexibility in the docu‐

ment model” on page 39.

The JSON representation has better locality than the multi-table schema in

Figure 2-1. If you want to fetch a profile in the relational example, you need to either

perform multiple queries (query each table by user_id) or perform a messy multi-

way join between the users table and its subordinate tables. In the JSON representa‐

tion, all the relevant information is in one place, and one query is sufficient.

The one-to-many relationships from the user profile to the user’s positions, educa‐

tional history, and contact information imply a tree structure in the data, and the

JSON representation makes this tree structure explicit (see Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2. One-to-many relationships forming a tree structure.

32 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Many-to-One and Many-to-Many Relationships

In Example 2-1 in the preceding section, region_id and industry_id are given as

IDs, not as plain-text strings "Greater Seattle Area" and "Philanthropy". Why?

If the user interface has free-text fields for entering the region and the industry, it

makes sense to store them as plain-text strings. But there are advantages to having

standardized lists of geographic regions and industries, and letting users choose from

a drop-down list or autocompleter:

• Consistent style and spelling across profiles

• Avoiding ambiguity (e.g., if there are several cities with the same name)

• Ease of updating—the name is stored in only one place, so it is easy to update

across the board if it ever needs to be changed (e.g., change of a city name due to

political events)

• Localization support—when the site is translated into other languages, the stand‐

ardized lists can be localized, so the region and industry can be displayed in the

viewer’s language

• Better search—e.g., a search for philanthropists in the state of Washington can

match this profile, because the list of regions can encode the fact that Seattle is in

Washington (which is not apparent from the string "Greater Seattle Area")

Whether you store an ID or a text string is a question of duplication. When you use

an ID, the information that is meaningful to humans (such as the word Philanthropy)

is stored in only one place, and everything that refers to it uses an ID (which only has

meaning within the database). When you store the text directly, you are duplicating

the human-meaningful information in every record that uses it.

The advantage of using an ID is that because it has no meaning to humans, it never

needs to change: the ID can remain the same, even if the information it identifies

changes. Anything that is meaningful to humans may need to change sometime in

the future—and if that information is duplicated, all the redundant copies need to be

updated. That incurs write overheads, and risks inconsistencies (where some copies

of the information are updated but others aren’t). Removing such duplication is the

key idea behind normalization in databases.ii

ii. Literature on the relational model distinguishes several different normal forms, but the distinctions are of little practical interest. As a rule of thumb, if you’re duplicating values that could be stored in just one place, the schema is not normalized.

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 33

Database administrators and developers love to argue about nor‐

malization and denormalization, but we will suspend judgment for

now. In Part III of this book we will return to this topic and explore

systematic ways of dealing with caching, denormalization, and

derived data.

Unfortunately, normalizing this data requires many-to-one relationships (many peo‐

ple live in one particular region, many people work in one particular industry), which

don’t fit nicely into the document model. In relational databases, it’s normal to refer

to rows in other tables by ID, because joins are easy. In document databases, joins are

not needed for one-to-many tree structures, and support for joins is often weak.iii

If the database itself does not support joins, you have to emulate a join in application

code by making multiple queries to the database. (In this case, the lists of regions and

industries are probably small and slow-changing enough that the application can

simply keep them in memory. But nevertheless, the work of making the join is shifted

from the database to the application code.)

Moreover, even if the initial version of an application fits well in a join-free docu‐

ment model, data has a tendency of becoming more interconnected as features are

added to applications. For example, consider some changes we could make to the

résumé example:

Organizations and schools as entities

In the previous description, organization (the company where the user worked)

and school_name (where they studied) are just strings. Perhaps they should be

references to entities instead? Then each organization, school, or university could

have its own web page (with logo, news feed, etc.); each résumé could link to the

organizations and schools that it mentions, and include their logos and other

information (see Figure 2-3 for an example from LinkedIn).

Recommendations

Say you want to add a new feature: one user can write a recommendation for

another user. The recommendation is shown on the résumé of the user who was

recommended, together with the name and photo of the user making the recom‐

mendation. If the recommender updates their photo, any recommendations they

have written need to reflect the new photo. Therefore, the recommendation

should have a reference to the author’s profile.

iii. At the time of writing, joins are supported in RethinkDB, not supported in MongoDB, and only sup‐

ported in predeclared views in CouchDB.

34 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Figure 2-3. The company name is not just a string, but a link to a company entity.

Screenshot of linkedin.com.

Figure 2-4 illustrates how these new features require many-to-many relationships.

The data within each dotted rectangle can be grouped into one document, but the

references to organizations, schools, and other users need to be represented as refer‐

ences, and require joins when queried.

Figure 2-4. Extending résumés with many-to-many relationships.

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 35

Are Document Databases Repeating History?

While many-to-many relationships and joins are routinely used in relational data‐

bases, document databases and NoSQL reopened the debate on how best to represent

such relationships in a database. This debate is much older than NoSQL—in fact, it

goes back to the very earliest computerized database systems.

The most popular database for business data processing in the 1970s was IBM’s Infor‐

mation Management System (IMS), originally developed for stock-keeping in the

Apollo space program and first commercially released in 1968 [13]. It is still in use

and maintained today, running on OS/390 on IBM mainframes [14].

The design of IMS used a fairly simple data model called the hierarchical model,

which has some remarkable similarities to the JSON model used by document data‐

bases [2]. It represented all data as a tree of records nested within records, much like

the JSON structure of Figure 2-2.

Like document databases, IMS worked well for one-to-many relationships, but it

made many-to-many relationships difficult, and it didn’t support joins. Developers

had to decide whether to duplicate (denormalize) data or to manually resolve refer‐

ences from one record to another. These problems of the 1960s and ’70s were very

much like the problems that developers are running into with document databases

today [15].

Various solutions were proposed to solve the limitations of the hierarchical model.

The two most prominent were the relational model (which became SQL, and took

over the world) and the network model (which initially had a large following but

eventually faded into obscurity). The “great debate” between these two camps lasted

for much of the 1970s [2].

Since the problem that the two models were solving is still so relevant today, it’s

worth briefly revisiting this debate in today’s light.

The network model

The network model was standardized by a committee called the Conference on Data

Systems Languages (CODASYL) and implemented by several different database ven‐

dors; it is also known as the CODASYL model [16].

The CODASYL model was a generalization of the hierarchical model. In the tree

structure of the hierarchical model, every record has exactly one parent; in the net‐

work model, a record could have multiple parents. For example, there could be one

record for the "Greater Seattle Area" region, and every user who lived in that

region could be linked to it. This allowed many-to-one and many-to-many relation‐

ships to be modeled.

36 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

The links between records in the network model were not foreign keys, but more like

pointers in a programming language (while still being stored on disk). The only way

of accessing a record was to follow a path from a root record along these chains of

links. This was called an access path.

In the simplest case, an access path could be like the traversal of a linked list: start at

the head of the list, and look at one record at a time until you find the one you want.

But in a world of many-to-many relationships, several different paths can lead to the

same record, and a programmer working with the network model had to keep track

of these different access paths in their head.

A query in CODASYL was performed by moving a cursor through the database by

iterating over lists of records and following access paths. If a record had multiple

parents (i.e., multiple incoming pointers from other records), the application code

had to keep track of all the various relationships. Even CODASYL committee mem‐

bers admitted that this was like navigating around an n-dimensional data space [17].

Although manual access path selection was able to make the most efficient use of the

very limited hardware capabilities in the 1970s (such as tape drives, whose seeks are

extremely slow), the problem was that they made the code for querying and updating

the database complicated and inflexible. With both the hierarchical and the network

model, if you didn’t have a path to the data you wanted, you were in a difficult situa‐

tion. You could change the access paths, but then you had to go through a lot of

handwritten database query code and rewrite it to handle the new access paths. It was

difficult to make changes to an application’s data model.

The relational model

What the relational model did, by contrast, was to lay out all the data in the open: a

relation (table) is simply a collection of tuples (rows), and that’s it. There are no laby‐

rinthine nested structures, no complicated access paths to follow if you want to look

at the data. You can read any or all of the rows in a table, selecting those that match

an arbitrary condition. You can read a particular row by designating some columns

as a key and matching on those. You can insert a new row into any table without

worrying about foreign key relationships to and from other tables.iv

In a relational database, the query optimizer automatically decides which parts of the

query to execute in which order, and which indexes to use. Those choices are effec‐

tively the “access path,” but the big difference is that they are made automatically by

iv. Foreign key constraints allow you to restrict modifications, but such constraints are not required by the relational model. Even with constraints, joins on foreign keys are performed at query time, whereas in CODASYL, the join was effectively done at insert time.

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 37

the query optimizer, not by the application developer, so we rarely need to think

about them.

If you want to query your data in new ways, you can just declare a new index, and

queries will automatically use whichever indexes are most appropriate. You don’t

need to change your queries to take advantage of a new index. (See also “Query Lan‐

guages for Data” on page 42.) The relational model thus made it much easier to add

new features to applications.

Query optimizers for relational databases are complicated beasts, and they have con‐

sumed many years of research and development effort [18]. But a key insight of the

relational model was this: you only need to build a query optimizer once, and then all

applications that use the database can benefit from it. If you don’t have a query opti‐

mizer, it’s easier to handcode the access paths for a particular query than to write a

general-purpose optimizer—but the general-purpose solution wins in the long run.

Comparison to document databases

Document databases reverted back to the hierarchical model in one aspect: storing

nested records (one-to-many relationships, like positions, education, and

contact_info in Figure 2-1) within their parent record rather than in a separate

table.

However, when it comes to representing many-to-one and many-to-many relation‐

ships, relational and document databases are not fundamentally different: in both

cases, the related item is referenced by a unique identifier, which is called a foreign

key in the relational model and a document reference in the document model [9].

That identifier is resolved at read time by using a join or follow-up queries. To date,

document databases have not followed the path of CODASYL.

Relational Versus Document Databases Today

There are many differences to consider when comparing relational databases to

document databases, including their fault-tolerance properties (see Chapter 5) and

handling of concurrency (see Chapter 7). In this chapter, we will concentrate only on

the differences in the data model.

The main arguments in favor of the document data model are schema flexibility, bet‐

ter performance due to locality, and that for some applications it is closer to the data

structures used by the application. The relational model counters by providing better

support for joins, and many-to-one and many-to-many relationships.

Which data model leads to simpler application code?

If the data in your application has a document-like structure (i.e., a tree of one-to-

many relationships, where typically the entire tree is loaded at once), then it’s proba‐

38 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

bly a good idea to use a document model. The relational technique of shredding—

splitting a document-like structure into multiple tables (like positions, education,

and contact_info in Figure 2-1)—can lead to cumbersome schemas and unnecessa‐

rily complicated application code.

The document model has limitations: for example, you cannot refer directly to a nes‐

ted item within a document, but instead you need to say something like “the second

item in the list of positions for user 251” (much like an access path in the hierarchical

model). However, as long as documents are not too deeply nested, that is not usually

a problem.

The poor support for joins in document databases may or may not be a problem,

depending on the application. For example, many-to-many relationships may never

be needed in an analytics application that uses a document database to record which

events occurred at which time [19].

However, if your application does use many-to-many relationships, the document

model becomes less appealing. It’s possible to reduce the need for joins by denormal‐

izing, but then the application code needs to do additional work to keep the denor‐

malized data consistent. Joins can be emulated in application code by making

multiple requests to the database, but that also moves complexity into the application

and is usually slower than a join performed by specialized code inside the database.

In such cases, using a document model can lead to significantly more complex appli‐

cation code and worse performance [15].

It’s not possible to say in general which data model leads to simpler application code;

it depends on the kinds of relationships that exist between data items. For highly

interconnected data, the document model is awkward, the relational model is accept‐

able, and graph models (see “Graph-Like Data Models” on page 49) are the most

natural.

Schema flexibility in the document model

Most document databases, and the JSON support in relational databases, do not

enforce any schema on the data in documents. XML support in relational databases

usually comes with optional schema validation. No schema means that arbitrary keys

and values can be added to a document, and when reading, clients have no guaran‐

tees as to what fields the documents may contain.

Document databases are sometimes called schemaless, but that’s misleading, as the

code that reads the data usually assumes some kind of structure—i.e., there is an

implicit schema, but it is not enforced by the database [20]. A more accurate term is

schema-on-read (the structure of the data is implicit, and only interpreted when the

data is read), in contrast with schema-on-write (the traditional approach of relational

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 39

databases, where the schema is explicit and the database ensures all written data con‐

forms to it) [21].

Schema-on-read is similar to dynamic (runtime) type checking in programming lan‐

guages, whereas schema-on-write is similar to static (compile-time) type checking.

Just as the advocates of static and dynamic type checking have big debates about their

relative merits [22], enforcement of schemas in database is a contentious topic, and in

general there’s no right or wrong answer.

The difference between the approaches is particularly noticeable in situations where

an application wants to change the format of its data. For example, say you are cur‐

rently storing each user’s full name in one field, and you instead want to store the

first name and last name separately [23]. In a document database, you would just

start writing new documents with the new fields and have code in the application that

handles the case when old documents are read. For example:

if (user && user.name && !user.first_name) {

// Documents written before Dec 8, 2013 don't have first_name

user.first_name = user.name.split(" ")[0];

}

On the other hand, in a “statically typed” database schema, you would typically per‐

form a migration along the lines of:

ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN first_name text;

UPDATE users SET first_name = split_part(name, ' ', 1); -- PostgreSQL

UPDATE users SET first_name = substring_index(name, ' ', 1); -- MySQL

Schema changes have a bad reputation of being slow and requiring downtime. This

reputation is not entirely deserved: most relational database systems execute the

ALTER TABLE statement in a few milliseconds. MySQL is a notable exception—it

copies the entire table on ALTER TABLE, which can mean minutes or even hours of

downtime when altering a large table—although various tools exist to work around

this limitation [24, 25, 26].

Running the UPDATE statement on a large table is likely to be slow on any database,

since every row needs to be rewritten. If that is not acceptable, the application can

leave first_name set to its default of NULL and fill it in at read time, like it would with

a document database.

The schema-on-read approach is advantageous if the items in the collection don’t all

have the same structure for some reason (i.e., the data is heterogeneous)—for exam‐

ple, because:

• There are many different types of objects, and it is not practical to put each type

of object in its own table.

40 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

• The structure of the data is determined by external systems over which you have

no control and which may change at any time.

In situations like these, a schema may hurt more than it helps, and schemaless docu‐

ments can be a much more natural data model. But in cases where all records are

expected to have the same structure, schemas are a useful mechanism for document‐

ing and enforcing that structure. We will discuss schemas and schema evolution in

more detail in Chapter 4.

Data locality for queries

A document is usually stored as a single continuous string, encoded as JSON, XML,

or a binary variant thereof (such as MongoDB’s BSON). If your application often

needs to access the entire document (for example, to render it on a web page), there is

a performance advantage to this storage locality. If data is split across multiple tables,

like in Figure 2-1, multiple index lookups are required to retrieve it all, which may

require more disk seeks and take more time.

The locality advantage only applies if you need large parts of the document at the

same time. The database typically needs to load the entire document, even if you

access only a small portion of it, which can be wasteful on large documents. On

updates to a document, the entire document usually needs to be rewritten—only

modifications that don’t change the encoded size of a document can easily be per‐

formed in place [19]. For these reasons, it is generally recommended that you keep

documents fairly small and avoid writes that increase the size of a document [9].

These performance limitations significantly reduce the set of situations in which

document databases are useful.

It’s worth pointing out that the idea of grouping related data together for locality is

not limited to the document model. For example, Google’s Spanner database offers

the same locality properties in a relational data model, by allowing the schema to

declare that a table’s rows should be interleaved (nested) within a parent table [27].

Oracle allows the same, using a feature called multi-table index cluster tables [28].

The column-family concept in the Bigtable data model (used in Cassandra and

HBase) has a similar purpose of managing locality [29].

We will also see more on locality in Chapter 3.

Convergence of document and relational databases

Most relational database systems (other than MySQL) have supported XML since the

mid-2000s. This includes functions to make local modifications to XML documents

and the ability to index and query inside XML documents, which allows applications

to use data models very similar to what they would do when using a document data‐

base.

Relational Model Versus Document Model | 41

PostgreSQL since version 9.3 [8], MySQL since version 5.7, and IBM DB2 since ver‐

sion 10.5 [30] also have a similar level of support for JSON documents. Given the

popularity of JSON for web APIs, it is likely that other relational databases will follow

in their footsteps and add JSON support.

On the document database side, RethinkDB supports relational-like joins in its query

language, and some MongoDB drivers automatically resolve database references

(effectively performing a client-side join, although this is likely to be slower than a

join performed in the database since it requires additional network round-trips and is

less optimized).

It seems that relational and document databases are becoming more similar over

time, and that is a good thing: the data models complement each other.v If a database

is able to handle document-like data and also perform relational queries on it, appli‐

cations can use the combination of features that best fits their needs.

A hybrid of the relational and document models is a good route for databases to take

in the future.

Query Languages for Data

When the relational model was introduced, it included a new way of querying data:

SQL is a declarative query language, whereas IMS and CODASYL queried the data‐

base using imperative code. What does that mean?

Many commonly used programming languages are imperative. For example, if you

have a list of animal species, you might write something like this to return only the

sharks in the list:

function getSharks() {

var sharks = [];

for (var i = 0; i < animals.length; i++) {

if (animals[i].family === "Sharks") {

sharks.push(animals[i]);

}

}

return sharks;

}

In the relational algebra, you would instead write:

sharks = σfamily = “Sharks” (animals)

v. Codd’s original description of the relational model [1] actually allowed something quite similar to JSON

documents within a relational schema. He called it nonsimple domains. The idea was that a value in a row doesn’t have to just be a primitive datatype like a number or a string, but could also be a nested relation (table)—so you can have an arbitrarily nested tree structure as a value, much like the JSON or XML support that was added to SQL over 30 years later.

42 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

where σ (the Greek letter sigma) is the selection operator, returning only those ani‐

mals that match the condition family = “Sharks” .

When SQL was defined, it followed the structure of the relational algebra fairly

closely:

SELECT * FROM animals WHERE family = 'Sharks';

An imperative language tells the computer to perform certain operations in a certain

order. You can imagine stepping through the code line by line, evaluating conditions,

updating variables, and deciding whether to go around the loop one more time.

In a declarative query language, like SQL or relational algebra, you just specify the

pattern of the data you want—what conditions the results must meet, and how you

want the data to be transformed (e.g., sorted, grouped, and aggregated)—but not how

to achieve that goal. It is up to the database system’s query optimizer to decide which

indexes and which join methods to use, and in which order to execute various parts

of the query.

A declarative query language is attractive because it is typically more concise and eas‐

ier to work with than an imperative API. But more importantly, it also hides imple‐

mentation details of the database engine, which makes it possible for the database

system to introduce performance improvements without requiring any changes to

queries.

For example, in the imperative code shown at the beginning of this section, the list of

animals appears in a particular order. If the database wants to reclaim unused disk

space behind the scenes, it might need to move records around, changing the order in

which the animals appear. Can the database do that safely, without breaking queries?

The SQL example doesn’t guarantee any particular ordering, and so it doesn’t mind if

the order changes. But if the query is written as imperative code, the database can

never be sure whether the code is relying on the ordering or not. The fact that SQL is

more limited in functionality gives the database much more room for automatic opti‐

mizations.

Finally, declarative languages often lend themselves to parallel execution. Today,

CPUs are getting faster by adding more cores, not by running at significantly higher

clock speeds than before [31]. Imperative code is very hard to parallelize across mul‐

tiple cores and multiple machines, because it specifies instructions that must be per‐

formed in a particular order. Declarative languages have a better chance of getting

faster in parallel execution because they specify only the pattern of the results, not the

algorithm that is used to determine the results. The database is free to use a parallel

implementation of the query language, if appropriate [32].

Query Languages for Data | 43

Declarative Queries on the Web

The advantages of declarative query languages are not limited to just databases. To

illustrate the point, let’s compare declarative and imperative approaches in a com‐

pletely different environment: a web browser.

Say you have a website about animals in the ocean. The user is currently viewing the

page on sharks, so you mark the navigation item “Sharks” as currently selected, like

this:

<ul>

<li class="selected" >

<p> Sharks</p>

<ul>

<li> Great White Shark</li>

<li> Tiger Shark</li>

<li> Hammerhead Shark</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li>

<p> Whales</p>

<ul>

<li> Blue Whale</li>

<li> Humpback Whale</li>

<li> Fin Whale</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

The selected item is marked with the CSS class "selected".

<p>Sharks</p> is the title of the currently selected page.

Now say you want the title of the currently selected page to have a blue background,

so that it is visually highlighted. This is easy, using CSS:

li.selected > p {

background-color: blue;

}

Here the CSS selector li.selected > p declares the pattern of elements to which we

want to apply the blue style: namely, all <p> elements whose direct parent is an <li>

element with a CSS class of selected. The element <p>Sharks</p> in the example

matches this pattern, but <p>Whales</p> does not match because its <li> parent

lacks class="selected".

44 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

If you were using XSL instead of CSS, you could do something similar:

<xsl:template match="li[@class='selected']/p" >

<fo:block background-color="blue" >

<xsl:apply-templates/>

</fo:block>

</xsl:template>

Here, the XPath expression li[@class='selected']/p is equivalent to the CSS selec‐

tor li.selected > p in the previous example. What CSS and XSL have in common

is that they are both declarative languages for specifying the styling of a document.

Imagine what life would be like if you had to use an imperative approach. In Java‐

Script, using the core Document Object Model (DOM) API, the result might look

something like this:

var liElements = document.getElementsByTagName("li");

for (var i = 0; i < liElements.length; i++) {

if (liElements[i].className === "selected") {

var children = liElements[i].childNodes;

for (var j = 0; j < children.length; j++) {

var child = children[j];

if (child.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE && child.tagName === "P") {

child.setAttribute("style", "background-color: blue");

}

}

}

}

This JavaScript imperatively sets the element <p>Sharks</p> to have a blue back‐

ground, but the code is awful. Not only is it much longer and harder to understand

than the CSS and XSL equivalents, but it also has some serious problems:

• If the selected class is removed (e.g., because the user clicks a different page),

the blue color won’t be removed, even if the code is rerun—and so the item will

remain highlighted until the entire page is reloaded. With CSS, the browser auto‐

matically detects when the li.selected > p rule no longer applies and removes

the blue background as soon as the selected class is removed.

• If you want to take advantage of a new API, such as document.getElementsBy

ClassName("selected") or even document.evaluate()—which may improve

performance—you have to rewrite the code. On the other hand, browser vendors

can improve the performance of CSS and XPath without breaking compatibility.

Query Languages for Data | 45

In a web browser, using declarative CSS styling is much better than manipulating

styles imperatively in JavaScript. Similarly, in databases, declarative query languages

like SQL turned out to be much better than imperative query APIs.vi

MapReduce Querying

MapReduce is a programming model for processing large amounts of data in bulk

across many machines, popularized by Google [33]. A limited form of MapReduce is

supported by some NoSQL datastores, including MongoDB and CouchDB, as a

mechanism for performing read-only queries across many documents.

MapReduce in general is described in more detail in Chapter 10. For now, we’ll just

briefly discuss MongoDB’s use of the model.

MapReduce is neither a declarative query language nor a fully imperative query API,

but somewhere in between: the logic of the query is expressed with snippets of code,

which are called repeatedly by the processing framework. It is based on the map (also

known as collect) and reduce (also known as fold or inject) functions that exist

in many functional programming languages.

To give an example, imagine you are a marine biologist, and you add an observation

record to your database every time you see animals in the ocean. Now you want to

generate a report saying how many sharks you have sighted per month.

In PostgreSQL you might express that query like this:

SELECT date_trunc('month', observation_timestamp) AS observation_month,

sum(num_animals) AS total_animals

FROM observations

WHERE family = 'Sharks'

GROUP BY observation_month;

The date_trunc('month', timestamp) function determines the calendar month

containing timestamp, and returns another timestamp representing the begin‐

ning of that month. In other words, it rounds a timestamp down to the nearest

month.

This query first filters the observations to only show species in the Sharks family,

then groups the observations by the calendar month in which they occurred, and

finally adds up the number of animals seen in all observations in that month.

The same can be expressed with MongoDB’s MapReduce feature as follows:

vi. IMS and CODASYL both used imperative query APIs. Applications typically used COBOL code to iterate

over records in the database, one record at a time [2, 16].

46 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

db.observations.mapReduce(

function map() {

var year = this.observationTimestamp.getFullYear();

var month = this.observationTimestamp.getMonth() + 1;

emit(year + "-" + month, this.numAnimals);

},

function reduce(key, values) {

return Array.sum(values);

},

{

query: { family: "Sharks" },

out: "monthlySharkReport"

}

);

The filter to consider only shark species can be specified declaratively (this is a

MongoDB-specific extension to MapReduce).

The JavaScript function map is called once for every document that matches

query, with this set to the document object.

The map function emits a key (a string consisting of year and month, such as

"2013-12" or "2014-1") and a value (the number of animals in that observation).

The key-value pairs emitted by map are grouped by key. For all key-value pairs

with the same key (i.e., the same month and year), the reduce function is called

once.

The reduce function adds up the number of animals from all observations in a

particular month.

The final output is written to the collection monthlySharkReport.

For example, say the observations collection contains these two documents:

{

observationTimestamp: Date.parse("Mon, 25 Dec 1995 12:34:56 GMT"),

family: "Sharks",

species: "Carcharodon carcharias",

numAnimals: 3

}

{

observationTimestamp: Date.parse("Tue, 12 Dec 1995 16:17:18 GMT"),

family: "Sharks",

species: "Carcharias taurus",

numAnimals: 4

}

Query Languages for Data | 47

The map function would be called once for each document, resulting in

emit("1995-12", 3) and emit("1995-12", 4). Subsequently, the reduce function

would be called with reduce("1995-12", [3, 4]), returning 7.

The map and reduce functions are somewhat restricted in what they are allowed to

do. They must be pure functions, which means they only use the data that is passed to

them as input, they cannot perform additional database queries, and they must not

have any side effects. These restrictions allow the database to run the functions any‐

where, in any order, and rerun them on failure. However, they are nevertheless pow‐

erful: they can parse strings, call library functions, perform calculations, and more.

MapReduce is a fairly low-level programming model for distributed execution on a

cluster of machines. Higher-level query languages like SQL can be implemented as a

pipeline of MapReduce operations (see Chapter 10), but there are also many dis‐

tributed implementations of SQL that don’t use MapReduce. Note there is nothing in

SQL that constrains it to running on a single machine, and MapReduce doesn’t have

a monopoly on distributed query execution.

Being able to use JavaScript code in the middle of a query is a great feature for

advanced queries, but it’s not limited to MapReduce—some SQL databases can be

extended with JavaScript functions too [34].

A usability problem with MapReduce is that you have to write two carefully coordi‐

nated JavaScript functions, which is often harder than writing a single query. More‐

over, a declarative query language offers more opportunities for a query optimizer to

improve the performance of a query. For these reasons, MongoDB 2.2 added support

for a declarative query language called the aggregation pipeline [9]. In this language,

the same shark-counting query looks like this:

db.observations.aggregate([

{ $match: { family: "Sharks" } },

{ $group: {

_id: {

year: { $year: "$observationTimestamp" },

month: { $month: "$observationTimestamp" }

},

totalAnimals: { $sum: "$numAnimals" }

} }

]);

The aggregation pipeline language is similar in expressiveness to a subset of SQL, but

it uses a JSON-based syntax rather than SQL’s English-sentence-style syntax; the dif‐

ference is perhaps a matter of taste. The moral of the story is that a NoSQL system

may find itself accidentally reinventing SQL, albeit in disguise.

48 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Graph-Like Data Models

We saw earlier that many-to-many relationships are an important distinguishing fea‐

ture between different data models. If your application has mostly one-to-many rela‐

tionships (tree-structured data) or no relationships between records, the document

model is appropriate.

But what if many-to-many relationships are very common in your data? The rela‐

tional model can handle simple cases of many-to-many relationships, but as the con‐

nections within your data become more complex, it becomes more natural to start

modeling your data as a graph.

A graph consists of two kinds of objects: vertices (also known as nodes or entities) and edges (also known as relationships or arcs). Many kinds of data can be modeled as a graph. Typical examples include: Social graphs

Vertices are people, and edges indicate which people know each other.

The web graph

Vertices are web pages, and edges indicate HTML links to other pages.

Road or rail networks

Vertices are junctions, and edges represent the roads or railway lines between

them.

Well-known algorithms can operate on these graphs: for example, car navigation sys‐

tems search for the shortest path between two points in a road network, and

PageRank can be used on the web graph to determine the popularity of a web page

and thus its ranking in search results.

In the examples just given, all the vertices in a graph represent the same kind of thing

(people, web pages, or road junctions, respectively). However, graphs are not limited

to such homogeneous data: an equally powerful use of graphs is to provide a consis‐

tent way of storing completely different types of objects in a single datastore. For

example, Facebook maintains a single graph with many different types of vertices and

edges: vertices represent people, locations, events, checkins, and comments made by

users; edges indicate which people are friends with each other, which checkin hap‐

pened in which location, who commented on which post, who attended which event,

and so on [35].

In this section we will use the example shown in Figure 2-5. It could be taken from a

social network or a genealogical database: it shows two people, Lucy from Idaho and

Alain from Beaune, France. They are married and living in London.

Graph-Like Data Models | 49

Figure 2-5. Example of graph-structured data (boxes represent vertices, arrows repre‐

sent edges).

There are several different, but related, ways of structuring and querying data in

graphs. In this section we will discuss the property graph model (implemented by

Neo4j, Titan, and InfiniteGraph) and the triple-store model (implemented by

Datomic, AllegroGraph, and others). We will look at three declarative query lan‐

guages for graphs: Cypher, SPARQL, and Datalog. Besides these, there are also

imperative graph query languages such as Gremlin [36] and graph processing frame‐

works like Pregel (see Chapter 10).

Property Graphs

In the property graph model, each vertex consists of:

• A unique identifier

• A set of outgoing edges

• A set of incoming edges

• A collection of properties (key-value pairs)

Each edge consists of:

• A unique identifier

• The vertex at which the edge starts (the tail vertex)

50 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

• The vertex at which the edge ends (the head vertex)

• A label to describe the kind of relationship between the two vertices

• A collection of properties (key-value pairs)

You can think of a graph store as consisting of two relational tables, one for vertices

and one for edges, as shown in Example 2-2 (this schema uses the PostgreSQL json

datatype to store the properties of each vertex or edge). The head and tail vertex are

stored for each edge; if you want the set of incoming or outgoing edges for a vertex,

you can query the edges table by head_vertex or tail_vertex, respectively.

Example 2-2. Representing a property graph using a relational schema

CREATE TABLE vertices (

vertex_id integer PRIMARY KEY,

properties json

);

CREATE TABLE edges (

edge_id integer PRIMARY KEY,

tail_vertex integer REFERENCES vertices (vertex_id),

head_vertex integer REFERENCES vertices (vertex_id),

label text,

properties json

);

CREATE INDEX edges_tails ON edges (tail_vertex);

CREATE INDEX edges_heads ON edges (head_vertex);

Some important aspects of this model are:

1. Any vertex can have an edge connecting it with any other vertex. There is no

schema that restricts which kinds of things can or cannot be associated.

2. Given any vertex, you can efficiently find both its incoming and its outgoing

edges, and thus traverse the graph—i.e., follow a path through a chain of vertices

—both forward and backward. (That’s why Example 2-2 has indexes on both the

tail_vertex and head_vertex columns.)

3. By using different labels for different kinds of relationships, you can store several

different kinds of information in a single graph, while still maintaining a clean

data model.

Those features give graphs a great deal of flexibility for data modeling, as illustrated

in Figure 2-5. The figure shows a few things that would be difficult to express in a

traditional relational schema, such as different kinds of regional structures in differ‐

ent countries (France has départements and régions, whereas the US has counties and states), quirks of history such as a country within a country (ignoring for now the Graph-Like Data Models | 51

intricacies of sovereign states and nations), and varying granularity of data (Lucy’s

current residence is specified as a city, whereas her place of birth is specified only at

the level of a state).

You could imagine extending the graph to also include many other facts about Lucy

and Alain, or other people. For instance, you could use it to indicate any food aller‐

gies they have (by introducing a vertex for each allergen, and an edge between a per‐

son and an allergen to indicate an allergy), and link the allergens with a set of vertices

that show which foods contain which substances. Then you could write a query to

find out what is safe for each person to eat. Graphs are good for evolvability: as you

add features to your application, a graph can easily be extended to accommodate

changes in your application’s data structures.

The Cypher Query Language

Cypher is a declarative query language for property graphs, created for the Neo4j

graph database [37]. (It is named after a character in the movie The Matrix and is not related to ciphers in cryptography [38].) Example 2-3 shows the Cypher query to insert the lefthand portion of Figure 2-5 into a graph database. The rest of the graph can be added similarly and is omitted for readability. Each vertex is given a symbolic name like USA or Idaho, and other parts of

the query can use those names to create edges between the vertices, using an arrow

notation: (Idaho) -[:WITHIN]-> (USA) creates an edge labeled WITHIN, with Idaho

as the tail node and USA as the head node.

Example 2-3. A subset of the data in Figure 2-5, represented as a Cypher query

CREATE

(NAmerica:Location {name:'North America', type:'continent'}),

(USA:Location {name:'United States', type:'country' }),

(Idaho:Location {name:'Idaho', type:'state' }),

(Lucy:Person {name:'Lucy' }),

(Idaho) -[:WITHIN]-> (USA) -[:WITHIN]-> (NAmerica),

(Lucy) -[:BORN_IN]-> (Idaho)

When all the vertices and edges of Figure 2-5 are added to the database, we can start

asking interesting questions: for example, find the names of all the people who emigra‐

ted from the United States to Europe. To be more precise, here we want to find all the

vertices that have a BORN_IN edge to a location within the US, and also a LIVING_IN

edge to a location within Europe, and return the name property of each of those verti‐

ces.

Example 2-4 shows how to express that query in Cypher. The same arrow notation is

used in a MATCH clause to find patterns in the graph: (person) -[:BORN_IN]-> ()

52 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

matches any two vertices that are related by an edge labeled BORN_IN. The tail vertex

of that edge is bound to the variable person, and the head vertex is left unnamed.

Example 2-4. Cypher query to find people who emigrated from the US to Europe

MATCH

(person) -[:BORN_IN]-> () -[:WITHIN*0..]-> (us:Location {name:'United States'}),

(person) -[:LIVES_IN]-> () -[:WITHIN*0..]-> (eu:Location {name:'Europe'})

RETURN person.name

The query can be read as follows:

Find any vertex (call it person) that meets both of the following conditions:

1. person has an outgoing BORN_IN edge to some vertex. From that vertex, you can

follow a chain of outgoing WITHIN edges until eventually you reach a vertex of

type Location, whose name property is equal to "United States".

2. That same person vertex also has an outgoing LIVES_IN edge. Following that

edge, and then a chain of outgoing WITHIN edges, you eventually reach a vertex of

type Location, whose name property is equal to "Europe".

For each such person vertex, return the name property.

There are several possible ways of executing the query. The description given here

suggests that you start by scanning all the people in the database, examine each per‐

son’s birthplace and residence, and return only those people who meet the criteria.

But equivalently, you could start with the two Location vertices and work backward.

If there is an index on the name property, you can probably efficiently find the two

vertices representing the US and Europe. Then you can proceed to find all locations

(states, regions, cities, etc.) in the US and Europe respectively by following all incom‐

ing WITHIN edges. Finally, you can look for people who can be found through an

incoming BORN_IN or LIVES_IN edge at one of the location vertices.

As is typical for a declarative query language, you don’t need to specify such execu‐

tion details when writing the query: the query optimizer automatically chooses the

strategy that is predicted to be the most efficient, so you can get on with writing the

rest of your application.

Graph Queries in SQL

Example 2-2 suggested that graph data can be represented in a relational database.

But if we put graph data in a relational structure, can we also query it using SQL?

The answer is yes, but with some difficulty. In a relational database, you usually know

in advance which joins you need in your query. In a graph query, you may need to

Graph-Like Data Models | 53

traverse a variable number of edges before you find the vertex you’re looking for—

that is, the number of joins is not fixed in advance.

In our example, that happens in the () -[:WITHIN*0..]-> () rule in the Cypher

query. A person’s LIVES_IN edge may point at any kind of location: a street, a city, a

district, a region, a state, etc. A city may be WITHIN a region, a region WITHIN a state, a

state WITHIN a country, etc. The LIVES_IN edge may point directly at the location ver‐

tex you’re looking for, or it may be several levels removed in the location hierarchy.

In Cypher, :WITHIN*0.. expresses that fact very concisely: it means “follow a WITHIN

edge, zero or more times.” It is like the * operator in a regular expression.

Since SQL:1999, this idea of variable-length traversal paths in a query can be

expressed using something called recursive common table expressions (the WITH

RECURSIVE syntax). Example 2-5 shows the same query—finding the names of people

who emigrated from the US to Europe—expressed in SQL using this technique (sup‐

ported in PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server). However, the syntax is

very clumsy in comparison to Cypher.

Example 2-5. The same query as Example 2-4, expressed in SQL using recursive

common table expressions

WITH RECURSIVE

-- in_usa is the set of vertex IDs of all locations within the United States

in_usa(vertex_id) AS (

SELECT vertex_id FROM vertices WHERE properties->>'name' = 'United States'

UNION

SELECT edges.tail_vertex FROM edges

JOIN in_usa ON edges.head_vertex = in_usa.vertex_id

WHERE edges.label = 'within'

),

-- in_europe is the set of vertex IDs of all locations within Europe

in_europe(vertex_id) AS (

SELECT vertex_id FROM vertices WHERE properties->>'name' = 'Europe'

UNION

SELECT edges.tail_vertex FROM edges

JOIN in_europe ON edges.head_vertex = in_europe.vertex_id

WHERE edges.label = 'within'

),

-- born_in_usa is the set of vertex IDs of all people born in the US

born_in_usa(vertex_id) AS (

SELECT edges.tail_vertex FROM edges

JOIN in_usa ON edges.head_vertex = in_usa.vertex_id

WHERE edges.label = 'born_in'

),

54 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

-- lives_in_europe is the set of vertex IDs of all people living in Europe

lives_in_europe(vertex_id) AS (

SELECT edges.tail_vertex FROM edges

JOIN in_europe ON edges.head_vertex = in_europe.vertex_id

WHERE edges.label = 'lives_in'

)

SELECT vertices.properties->>'name'

FROM vertices

-- join to find those people who were both born in the US *and* live in Europe

JOIN born_in_usa ON vertices.vertex_id = born_in_usa.vertex_id

JOIN lives_in_europe ON vertices.vertex_id = lives_in_europe.vertex_id;

First find the vertex whose name property has the value "United States", and

make it the first element of the set of vertices in_usa.

Follow all incoming within edges from vertices in the set in_usa, and add them

to the same set, until all incoming within edges have been visited.

Do the same starting with the vertex whose name property has the value

"Europe", and build up the set of vertices in_europe.

For each of the vertices in the set in_usa, follow incoming born_in edges to find

people who were born in some place within the United States.

Similarly, for each of the vertices in the set in_europe, follow incoming lives_in

edges to find people who live in Europe.

Finally, intersect the set of people born in the USA with the set of people living in

Europe, by joining them.

If the same query can be written in 4 lines in one query language but requires 29 lines

in another, that just shows that different data models are designed to satisfy different

use cases. It’s important to pick a data model that is suitable for your application.

Triple-Stores and SPARQL

The triple-store model is mostly equivalent to the property graph model, using differ‐

ent words to describe the same ideas. It is nevertheless worth discussing, because

there are various tools and languages for triple-stores that can be valuable additions

to your toolbox for building applications.

In a triple-store, all information is stored in the form of very simple three-part state‐

ments: ( subject, predicate, object). For example, in the triple ( Jim, likes, bananas), Jim is the subject, likes is the predicate (verb), and bananas is the object.

Graph-Like Data Models | 55

The subject of a triple is equivalent to a vertex in a graph. The object is one of two

things:

1. A value in a primitive datatype, such as a string or a number. In that case, the

predicate and object of the triple are equivalent to the key and value of a property

on the subject vertex. For example, ( lucy, age, 33) is like a vertex lucy with properties {"age":33}.

2. Another vertex in the graph. In that case, the predicate is an edge in the graph,

the subject is the tail vertex, and the object is the head vertex. For example, in

( lucy, marriedTo, alain) the subject and object lucy and alain are both vertices, and the predicate marriedTo is the label of the edge that connects them.

Example 2-6 shows the same data as in Example 2-3, written as triples in a format called Turtle, a subset of Notation3 ( N3) [39].

Example 2-6. A subset of the data in Figure 2-5, represented as Turtle triples

@prefix : <urn:example:>.

_:lucy a :Person.

_:lucy :name "Lucy".

_:lucy :bornIn _:idaho.

_:idaho a :Location.

_:idaho :name "Idaho".

_:idaho :type "state".

_:idaho :within _:usa.

_:usa a :Location.

_:usa :name "United States".

_:usa :type "country".

_:usa :within _:namerica.

_:namerica a :Location.

_:namerica :name "North America".

_:namerica :type "continent".

In this example, vertices of the graph are written as _: someName. The name doesn’t

mean anything outside of this file; it exists only because we otherwise wouldn’t know

which triples refer to the same vertex. When the predicate represents an edge, the

object is a vertex, as in _:idaho :within _:usa. When the predicate is a property,

the object is a string literal, as in _:usa :name "United States".

It’s quite repetitive to repeat the same subject over and over again, but fortunately

you can use semicolons to say multiple things about the same subject. This makes the

Turtle format quite nice and readable: see Example 2-7.

56 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Example 2-7. A more concise way of writing the data in Example 2-6

@prefix : <urn:example:>.

_:lucy a :Person; :name "Lucy"; :bornIn _:idaho.

_:idaho a :Location; :name "Idaho"; :type "state"; :within _:usa.

_:usa a :Location; :name "United States"; :type "country"; :within _:namerica.

_:namerica a :Location; :name "North America"; :type "continent".

The semantic web

If you read more about triple-stores, you may get sucked into a maelstrom of articles

written about the semantic web. The triple-store data model is completely independ‐

ent of the semantic web—for example, Datomic [40] is a triple-store that does not

claim to have anything to do with it.vii But since the two are so closely linked in many

people’s minds, we should discuss them briefly.

The semantic web is fundamentally a simple and reasonable idea: websites already

publish information as text and pictures for humans to read, so why don’t they also

publish information as machine-readable data for computers to read? The Resource

Description Framework (RDF) [41] was intended as a mechanism for different web‐

sites to publish data in a consistent format, allowing data from different websites to

be automatically combined into a web of data—a kind of internet-wide “database of

everything.”

Unfortunately, the semantic web was overhyped in the early 2000s but so far hasn’t

shown any sign of being realized in practice, which has made many people cynical

about it. It has also suffered from a dizzying plethora of acronyms, overly complex

standards proposals, and hubris.

However, if you look past those failings, there is also a lot of good work that has come

out of the semantic web project. Triples can be a good internal data model for appli‐

cations, even if you have no interest in publishing RDF data on the semantic web.

The RDF data model

The Turtle language we used in Example 2-7 is a human-readable format for RDF

data. Sometimes RDF is also written in an XML format, which does the same thing

much more verbosely—see Example 2-8. Turtle/N3 is preferable as it is much easier

on the eyes, and tools like Apache Jena [42] can automatically convert between differ‐

ent RDF formats if necessary.

vii. Technically, Datomic uses 5-tuples rather than triples; the two additional fields are metadata for versioning.

Graph-Like Data Models | 57

Example 2-8. The data of Example 2-7 , expressed using RDF/XML syntax

<rdf:RDF xmlns="urn:example:"

xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" >

<Location rdf:nodeID="idaho" >

<name> Idaho</name>

<type> state</type>

<within>

<Location rdf:nodeID="usa" >

<name> United States</name>

<type> country</type>

<within>

<Location rdf:nodeID="namerica" >

<name> North America</name>

<type> continent</type>

</Location>

</within>

</Location>

</within>

</Location>

<Person rdf:nodeID="lucy" >

<name> Lucy</name>

<bornIn rdf:nodeID="idaho" />

</Person>

</rdf:RDF>

RDF has a few quirks due to the fact that it is designed for internet-wide data

exchange. The subject, predicate, and object of a triple are often URIs. For example, a

predicate might be an URI such as <http://my-company.com/namespace#within> or

<http://my-company.com/namespace#lives_in>, rather than just WITHIN or

LIVES_IN. The reasoning behind this design is that you should be able to combine

your data with someone else’s data, and if they attach a different meaning to the word

within or lives_in, you won’t get a conflict because their predicates are actually

<http://other.org/foo#within> and <http://other.org/foo#lives_in>.

The URL <http://my-company.com/namespace> doesn’t necessarily need to resolve

to anything—from RDF’s point of view, it is simply a namespace. To avoid potential

confusion with http:// URLs, the examples in this section use non-resolvable URIs

such as urn:example:within. Fortunately, you can just specify this prefix once at the

top of the file, and then forget about it.

58 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

The SPARQL query language

SPARQL is a query language for triple-stores using the RDF data model [43]. (It is an acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language, pronounced “sparkle.”) It predates Cypher, and since Cypher’s pattern matching is borrowed from SPARQL,

they look quite similar [37].

The same query as before—finding people who have moved from the US to Europe—

is even more concise in SPARQL than it is in Cypher (see Example 2-9).

Example 2-9. The same query as Example 2-4, expressed in SPARQL

PREFIX : <urn:example:>

SELECT ?personName WHERE {

?person :name ?personName.

?person :bornIn / :within* / :name "United States".

?person :livesIn / :within* / :name "Europe".

}

The structure is very similar. The following two expressions are equivalent (variables

start with a question mark in SPARQL):

(person) -[:BORN_IN]-> () -[:WITHIN*0..]-> (location) # Cypher

?person :bornIn / :within* ?location. # SPARQL

Because RDF doesn’t distinguish between properties and edges but just uses predi‐

cates for both, you can use the same syntax for matching properties. In the following

expression, the variable usa is bound to any vertex that has a name property whose

value is the string "United States":

(usa {name:'United States'}) # Cypher

?usa :name "United States". # SPARQL

SPARQL is a nice query language—even if the semantic web never happens, it can be

a powerful tool for applications to use internally.

Graph-Like Data Models | 59

Graph Databases Compared to the Network Model

In “Are Document Databases Repeating History?” on page 36 we discussed how

CODASYL and the relational model competed to solve the problem of many-to-

many relationships in IMS. At first glance, CODASYL’s network model looks similar

to the graph model. Are graph databases the second coming of CODASYL in

disguise?

No. They differ in several important ways:

• In CODASYL, a database had a schema that specified which record type could be

nested within which other record type. In a graph database, there is no such

restriction: any vertex can have an edge to any other vertex. This gives much

greater flexibility for applications to adapt to changing requirements.

• In CODASYL, the only way to reach a particular record was to traverse one of

the access paths to it. In a graph database, you can refer directly to any vertex by

its unique ID, or you can use an index to find vertices with a particular value.

• In CODASYL, the children of a record were an ordered set, so the database had

to maintain that ordering (which had consequences for the storage layout) and

applications that inserted new records into the database had to worry about the

positions of the new records in these sets. In a graph database, vertices and edges

are not ordered (you can only sort the results when making a query).

• In CODASYL, all queries were imperative, difficult to write and easily broken by

changes in the schema. In a graph database, you can write your traversal in

imperative code if you want to, but most graph databases also support high-level,

declarative query languages such as Cypher or SPARQL.

The Foundation: Datalog

Datalog is a much older language than SPARQL or Cypher, having been studied

extensively by academics in the 1980s [44, 45, 46]. It is less well known among soft‐

ware engineers, but it is nevertheless important, because it provides the foundation

that later query languages build upon.

In practice, Datalog is used in a few data systems: for example, it is the query lan‐

guage of Datomic [40], and Cascalog [47] is a Datalog implementation for querying large datasets in Hadoop.viii viii. Datomic and Cascalog use a Clojure S-expression syntax for Datalog. In the following examples we use a Prolog syntax, which is a little easier to read, but this makes no functional difference.

60 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

Datalog’s data model is similar to the triple-store model, generalized a bit. Instead of

writing a triple as ( subject, predicate, object), we write it as predicate( subject, object).

Example 2-10 shows how to write the data from our example in Datalog.

Example 2-10. A subset of the data in Figure 2-5 , represented as Datalog facts name(namerica, 'North America').

type(namerica, continent).

name(usa, 'United States').

type(usa, country).

within(usa, namerica).

name(idaho, 'Idaho').

type(idaho, state).

within(idaho, usa).

name(lucy, 'Lucy').

born_in(lucy, idaho).

Now that we have defined the data, we can write the same query as before, as shown

in Example 2-11. It looks a bit different from the equivalent in Cypher or SPARQL,

but don’t let that put you off. Datalog is a subset of Prolog, which you might have

seen before if you’ve studied computer science.

Example 2-11. The same query as Example 2-4 , expressed in Datalog

within_recursive(Location, Name) :- name(Location, Name). /* Rule 1 */

within_recursive(Location, Name) :- within(Location, Via), /* Rule 2 */

within_recursive(Via, Name).

migrated(Name, BornIn, LivingIn) :- name(Person, Name), /* Rule 3 */

born_in(Person, BornLoc),

within_recursive(BornLoc, BornIn),

lives_in(Person, LivingLoc),

within_recursive(LivingLoc, LivingIn).

?- migrated(Who, 'United States', 'Europe').

/* Who = 'Lucy'. */

Cypher and SPARQL jump in right away with SELECT, but Datalog takes a small step

at a time. We define rules that tell the database about new predicates: here, we define

two new predicates, within_recursive and migrated. These predicates aren’t triples

stored in the database, but instead they are derived from data or from other rules.

Rules can refer to other rules, just like functions can call other functions or recur‐

sively call themselves. Like this, complex queries can be built up a small piece at a

time.

Graph-Like Data Models | 61

In rules, words that start with an uppercase letter are variables, and predicates are

matched like in Cypher and SPARQL. For example, name(Location, Name) matches

the triple name(namerica, 'North America') with variable bindings Location =

namerica and Name = 'North America'.

A rule applies if the system can find a match for all predicates on the righthand side

of the :- operator. When the rule applies, it’s as though the lefthand side of the :-

was added to the database (with variables replaced by the values they matched).

One possible way of applying the rules is thus:

1. name(namerica, 'North America') exists in the database, so rule 1 applies. It

generates within_recursive(namerica, 'North America').

2. within(usa, namerica) exists in the database and the previous step generated

within_recursive(namerica, 'North America'), so rule 2 applies. It generates

within_recursive(usa, 'North America').

3. within(idaho, usa) exists in the database and the previous step generated

within_recursive(usa, 'North America'), so rule 2 applies. It generates

within_recursive(idaho, 'North America').

By repeated application of rules 1 and 2, the within_recursive predicate can tell us

all the locations in North America (or any other location name) contained in our

database. This process is illustrated in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6. Determining that Idaho is in North America, using the Datalog rules from

Example 2-11.

Now rule 3 can find people who were born in some location BornIn and live in some

location LivingIn. By querying with BornIn = 'United States' and LivingIn =

'Europe', and leaving the person as a variable Who, we ask the Datalog system to find

out which values can appear for the variable Who. So, finally we get the same answer as

in the earlier Cypher and SPARQL queries.

62 | Chapter 2: Data Models and Query Languages

The Datalog approach requires a different kind of thinking to the other query lan‐

guages discussed in this chapter, but it’s a very powerful approach, because rules can

be combined and reused in different queries. It’s less convenient for simple one-off

queries, but it can cope better if your data is complex.

Summary

Data models are a huge subject, and in this chapter we have taken a quick look at a

broad variety of different models. We didn’t have space to go into all the details of

each model, but hopefully the overview has been enough to whet your appetite to

find out more about the model that best fits your application’s requirements.

Historically, data started out being represented as one big tree (the hierarchical

model), but that wasn’t good for representing many-to-many relationships, so the

relational model was invented to solve that problem. More recently, developers found

that some applications don’t fit well in the relational model either. New nonrelational

“NoSQL” datastores have diverged in two main directions:

1. Document databases target use cases where data comes in self-contained docu‐

ments and relationships between one document and another are rare.

2. Graph databases go in the opposite direction, targeting use cases where anything

is potentially related to everything.

All three models (document, relational, and graph) are widely used today, and each is

good in its respective domain. One model can be emulated in terms of another model

—for example, graph data can be represented in a relational database—but the result

is often awkward. That’s why we have different systems for different purposes, not a

single one-size-fits-all solution.

One thing that document and graph databases have in common is that they typically

don’t enforce a schema for the data they store, which can make it easier to adapt

applications to changing requirements. However, your application most likely still

assumes that data has a certain structure; it’s just a question of whether the schema is

explicit (enforced on write) or implicit (handled on read).

Each data model comes with its own query language or framework, and we discussed

several examples: SQL, MapReduce, MongoDB’s aggregation pipeline, Cypher,

SPARQL, and Datalog. We also touched on CSS and XSL/XPath, which aren’t data‐

base query languages but have interesting parallels.

Although we have covered a lot of ground, there are still many data models left

unmentioned. To give just a few brief examples:

• Researchers working with genome data often need to perform sequence-

similarity searches, which means taking one very long string (representing a

Summary | 63

DNA molecule) and matching it against a large database of strings that are simi‐

lar, but not identical. None of the databases described here can handle this kind

of usage, which is why researchers have written specialized genome database

software like GenBank [48].

• Particle physicists have been doing Big Data–style large-scale data analysis for

decades, and projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now work with hun‐

dreds of petabytes! At such a scale custom solutions are required to stop the

hardware cost from spiraling out of control [49].

• Full-text search is arguably a kind of data model that is frequently used alongside

databases. Information retrieval is a large specialist subject that we won’t cover in

great detail in this book, but we’ll touch on search indexes in Chapter 3 and

Part III.

We have to leave it there for now. In the next chapter we will discuss some of the

trade-offs that come into play when implementing the data models described in this

chapter.

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of a Database System,” Foundations and Trends in Databases, volume 1, number 2, pages 141–259, November 2007. doi:10.1561/1900000002

[19] Sandeep Parikh and Kelly Stirman: “Schema Design for Time Series Data in

MongoDB,” blog.mongodb.org, October 30, 2013.

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[43] Steve Harris, Andy Seaborne, and Eric Prud’hommeaux: “SPARQL 1.1 Query

Language,” W3C Recommendation, March 2013.

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log and Recursive Query Processing,” Foundations and Trends in Databases, volume 5, number 2, pages 105–195, November 2013. doi:10.1561/1900000017

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Know About Datalog (And Never Dared to Ask),” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, volume 1, number 1, pages 146–166, March 1989. doi:

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Summary | 67

CHAPTER 3

Storage and Retrieval

Wer Ordnung hält, ist nur zu faul zum Suchen.

(If you keep things tidily ordered, you’re just too lazy to go searching.)

—German proverb

On the most fundamental level, a database needs to do two things: when you give it

some data, it should store the data, and when you ask it again later, it should give the

data back to you.

In Chapter 2 we discussed data models and query languages—i.e., the format in

which you (the application developer) give the database your data, and the mecha‐

nism by which you can ask for it again later. In this chapter we discuss the same from

the database’s point of view: how we can store the data that we’re given, and how we

can find it again when we’re asked for it.

Why should you, as an application developer, care how the database handles storage

and retrieval internally? You’re probably not going to implement your own storage

engine from scratch, but you do need to select a storage engine that is appropriate for

your application, from the many that are available. In order to tune a storage engine

to perform well on your kind of workload, you need to have a rough idea of what the

storage engine is doing under the hood.

In particular, there is a big difference between storage engines that are optimized for

transactional workloads and those that are optimized for analytics. We will explore

that distinction later in “Transaction Processing or Analytics?” on page 90, and in

“Column-Oriented Storage” on page 95 we’ll discuss a family of storage engines that

is optimized for analytics.

However, first we’ll start this chapter by talking about storage engines that are used in

the kinds of databases that you’re probably familiar with: traditional relational data‐

bases, and also most so-called NoSQL databases. We will examine two families of

69

storage engines: log-structured storage engines, and page-oriented storage engines such as B-trees.

Data Structures That Power Your Database

Consider the world’s simplest database, implemented as two Bash functions:

#!/bin/bash

db_set () {

echo "$1,$2" >> database

}

db_get () {

grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1

}

These two functions implement a key-value store. You can call db_set key value,

which will store key and value in the database. The key and value can be (almost)

anything you like—for example, the value could be a JSON document. You can then

call db_get key, which looks up the most recent value associated with that particular

key and returns it.

And it works:

$ db_set 123456 '{"name":"London","attractions":["Big Ben","London Eye"]}'

$ db_set 42 '{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Golden Gate Bridge"]}'

$ db_get 42

{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Golden Gate Bridge"]}

The underlying storage format is very simple: a text file where each line contains a

key-value pair, separated by a comma (roughly like a CSV file, ignoring escaping

issues). Every call to db_set appends to the end of the file, so if you update a key sev‐

eral times, the old versions of the value are not overwritten—you need to look at the

last occurrence of a key in a file to find the latest value (hence the tail -n 1 in

db_get):

$ db_set 42 '{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Exploratorium"]}'

$ db_get 42

{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Exploratorium"]}

$ cat database

123456,{"name":"London","attractions":["Big Ben","London Eye"]}

42,{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Golden Gate Bridge"]}

42,{"name":"San Francisco","attractions":["Exploratorium"]}

70 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

Our db_set function actually has pretty good performance for something that is so

simple, because appending to a file is generally very efficient. Similarly to what

db_set does, many databases internally use a log, which is an append-only data file.

Real databases have more issues to deal with (such as concurrency control, reclaim‐

ing disk space so that the log doesn’t grow forever, and handling errors and partially

written records), but the basic principle is the same. Logs are incredibly useful, and

we will encounter them several times in the rest of this book.

The word log is often used to refer to application logs, where an

application outputs text that describes what’s happening. In this

book, log is used in the more general sense: an append-only

sequence of records. It doesn’t have to be human-readable; it might

be binary and intended only for other programs to read.

On the other hand, our db_get function has terrible performance if you have a large

number of records in your database. Every time you want to look up a key, db_get

has to scan the entire database file from beginning to end, looking for occurrences of

the key. In algorithmic terms, the cost of a lookup is O( n): if you double the number

of records n in your database, a lookup takes twice as long. That’s not good.

In order to efficiently find the value for a particular key in the database, we need a

different data structure: an index. In this chapter we will look at a range of indexing

structures and see how they compare; the general idea behind them is to keep some

additional metadata on the side, which acts as a signpost and helps you to locate the

data you want. If you want to search the same data in several different ways, you may

need several different indexes on different parts of the data.

An index is an additional structure that is derived from the primary data. Many data‐

bases allow you to add and remove indexes, and this doesn’t affect the contents of the

database; it only affects the performance of queries. Maintaining additional structures

incurs overhead, especially on writes. For writes, it’s hard to beat the performance of

simply appending to a file, because that’s the simplest possible write operation. Any

kind of index usually slows down writes, because the index also needs to be updated

every time data is written.

This is an important trade-off in storage systems: well-chosen indexes speed up read

queries, but every index slows down writes. For this reason, databases don’t usually

index everything by default, but require you—the application developer or database

administrator—to choose indexes manually, using your knowledge of the applica‐

tion’s typical query patterns. You can then choose the indexes that give your applica‐

tion the greatest benefit, without introducing more overhead than necessary.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 71

Hash Indexes

Let’s start with indexes for key-value data. This is not the only kind of data you can

index, but it’s very common, and it’s a useful building block for more complex

indexes.

Key-value stores are quite similar to the dictionary type that you can find in most

programming languages, and which is usually implemented as a hash map (hash

table). Hash maps are described in many algorithms textbooks [1, 2], so we won’t go into detail of how they work here. Since we already have hash maps for our in-memory data structures, why not use them to index our data on disk?

Let’s say our data storage consists only of appending to a file, as in the preceding

example. Then the simplest possible indexing strategy is this: keep an in-memory

hash map where every key is mapped to a byte offset in the data file—the location at

which the value can be found, as illustrated in Figure 3-1. Whenever you append a

new key-value pair to the file, you also update the hash map to reflect the offset of the

data you just wrote (this works both for inserting new keys and for updating existing

keys). When you want to look up a value, use the hash map to find the offset in the

data file, seek to that location, and read the value.

Figure 3-1. Storing a log of key-value pairs in a CSV-like format, indexed with an in-

memory hash map.

This may sound simplistic, but it is a viable approach. In fact, this is essentially what

Bitcask (the default storage engine in Riak) does [3]. Bitcask offers high-performance

reads and writes, subject to the requirement that all the keys fit in the available RAM,

since the hash map is kept completely in memory. The values can use more space

than there is available memory, since they can be loaded from disk with just one disk

72 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

seek. If that part of the data file is already in the filesystem cache, a read doesn’t

require any disk I/O at all.

A storage engine like Bitcask is well suited to situations where the value for each key

is updated frequently. For example, the key might be the URL of a cat video, and the

value might be the number of times it has been played (incremented every time

someone hits the play button). In this kind of workload, there are a lot of writes, but

there are not too many distinct keys—you have a large number of writes per key, but

it’s feasible to keep all keys in memory.

As described so far, we only ever append to a file—so how do we avoid eventually

running out of disk space? A good solution is to break the log into segments of a cer‐

tain size by closing a segment file when it reaches a certain size, and making subse‐

quent writes to a new segment file. We can then perform compaction on these

segments, as illustrated in Figure 3-2. Compaction means throwing away duplicate

keys in the log, and keeping only the most recent update for each key.

Figure 3-2. Compaction of a key-value update log (counting the number of times each

cat video was played), retaining only the most recent value for each key.

Moreover, since compaction often makes segments much smaller (assuming that a

key is overwritten several times on average within one segment), we can also merge

several segments together at the same time as performing the compaction, as shown

in Figure 3-3. Segments are never modified after they have been written, so the

merged segment is written to a new file. The merging and compaction of frozen seg‐

ments can be done in a background thread, and while it is going on, we can still con‐

tinue to serve read and write requests as normal, using the old segment files. After the

merging process is complete, we switch read requests to using the new merged seg‐

ment instead of the old segments—and then the old segment files can simply be

deleted.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 73

Figure 3-3. Performing compaction and segment merging simultaneously.

Each segment now has its own in-memory hash table, mapping keys to file offsets. In

order to find the value for a key, we first check the most recent segment’s hash map;

if the key is not present we check the second-most-recent segment, and so on. The

merging process keeps the number of segments small, so lookups don’t need to check

many hash maps.

Lots of detail goes into making this simple idea work in practice. Briefly, some of the

issues that are important in a real implementation are:

File format

CSV is not the best format for a log. It’s faster and simpler to use a binary format

that first encodes the length of a string in bytes, followed by the raw string

(without need for escaping).

Deleting records

If you want to delete a key and its associated value, you have to append a special

deletion record to the data file (sometimes called a tombstone). When log seg‐

ments are merged, the tombstone tells the merging process to discard any previ‐

ous values for the deleted key.

Crash recovery

If the database is restarted, the in-memory hash maps are lost. In principle, you

can restore each segment’s hash map by reading the entire segment file from

beginning to end and noting the offset of the most recent value for every key as

you go along. However, that might take a long time if the segment files are large,

which would make server restarts painful. Bitcask speeds up recovery by storing

74 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

a snapshot of each segment’s hash map on disk, which can be loaded into mem‐

ory more quickly.

Partially written records

The database may crash at any time, including halfway through appending a

record to the log. Bitcask files include checksums, allowing such corrupted parts

of the log to be detected and ignored.

Concurrency control

As writes are appended to the log in a strictly sequential order, a common imple‐

mentation choice is to have only one writer thread. Data file segments are

append-only and otherwise immutable, so they can be read concurrently by mul‐

tiple threads.

An append-only log seems wasteful at first glance: why don’t you update the file in

place, overwriting the old value with the new value? But an append-only design turns

out to be good for several reasons:

• Appending and segment merging are sequential write operations, which are gen‐

erally much faster than random writes, especially on magnetic spinning-disk

hard drives. To some extent sequential writes are also preferable on flash-based

solid state drives (SSDs) [4]. We will discuss this issue further in “Comparing B-

Trees and LSM-Trees” on page 83.

• Concurrency and crash recovery are much simpler if segment files are append-

only or immutable. For example, you don’t have to worry about the case where a

crash happened while a value was being overwritten, leaving you with a file con‐

taining part of the old and part of the new value spliced together.

• Merging old segments avoids the problem of data files getting fragmented over

time.

However, the hash table index also has limitations:

• The hash table must fit in memory, so if you have a very large number of keys,

you’re out of luck. In principle, you could maintain a hash map on disk, but

unfortunately it is difficult to make an on-disk hash map perform well. It

requires a lot of random access I/O, it is expensive to grow when it becomes full,

and hash collisions require fiddly logic [5].

• Range queries are not efficient. For example, you cannot easily scan over all keys

between kitty00000 and kitty99999—you’d have to look up each key individu‐

ally in the hash maps.

In the next section we will look at an indexing structure that doesn’t have those limi‐

tations.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 75

SSTables and LSM-Trees

In Figure 3-3, each log-structured storage segment is a sequence of key-value pairs.

These pairs appear in the order that they were written, and values later in the log take

precedence over values for the same key earlier in the log. Apart from that, the order

of key-value pairs in the file does not matter.

Now we can make a simple change to the format of our segment files: we require that

the sequence of key-value pairs is sorted by key. At first glance, that requirement

seems to break our ability to use sequential writes, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

We call this format Sorted String Table, or SSTable for short. We also require that

each key only appears once within each merged segment file (the compaction process

already ensures that). SSTables have several big advantages over log segments with

hash indexes:

1. Merging segments is simple and efficient, even if the files are bigger than the

available memory. The approach is like the one used in the mergesort algorithm

and is illustrated in Figure 3-4: you start reading the input files side by side, look

at the first key in each file, copy the lowest key (according to the sort order) to

the output file, and repeat. This produces a new merged segment file, also sorted

by key.

Figure 3-4. Merging several SSTable segments, retaining only the most recent value

for each key.

76 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

What if the same key appears in several input segments? Remember that each

segment contains all the values written to the database during some period of

time. This means that all the values in one input segment must be more recent

than all the values in the other segment (assuming that we always merge adjacent

segments). When multiple segments contain the same key, we can keep the value

from the most recent segment and discard the values in older segments.

2. In order to find a particular key in the file, you no longer need to keep an index

of all the keys in memory. See Figure 3-5 for an example: say you’re looking for

the key handiwork, but you don’t know the exact offset of that key in the segment

file. However, you do know the offsets for the keys handbag and handsome, and

because of the sorting you know that handiwork must appear between those two.

This means you can jump to the offset for handbag and scan from there until you

find handiwork (or not, if the key is not present in the file).

Figure 3-5. An SSTable with an in-memory index.

You still need an in-memory index to tell you the offsets for some of the keys, but

it can be sparse: one key for every few kilobytes of segment file is sufficient,

because a few kilobytes can be scanned very quickly.i

3. Since read requests need to scan over several key-value pairs in the requested

range anyway, it is possible to group those records into a block and compress it

before writing it to disk (indicated by the shaded area in Figure 3-5). Each entry

of the sparse in-memory index then points at the start of a compressed block.

Besides saving disk space, compression also reduces the I/O bandwidth use.

i. If all keys and values had a fixed size, you could use binary search on a segment file and avoid the in-

memory index entirely. However, they are usually variable-length in practice, which makes it difficult to tell where one record ends and the next one starts if you don’t have an index.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 77

Constructing and maintaining SSTables

Fine so far—but how do you get your data to be sorted by key in the first place? Our

incoming writes can occur in any order.

Maintaining a sorted structure on disk is possible (see “B-Trees” on page 79), but

maintaining it in memory is much easier. There are plenty of well-known tree data

structures that you can use, such as red-black trees or AVL trees [2]. With these data

structures, you can insert keys in any order and read them back in sorted order.

We can now make our storage engine work as follows:

• When a write comes in, add it to an in-memory balanced tree data structure (for

example, a red-black tree). This in-memory tree is sometimes called a memtable.

• When the memtable gets bigger than some threshold—typically a few megabytes

—write it out to disk as an SSTable file. This can be done efficiently because the

tree already maintains the key-value pairs sorted by key. The new SSTable file

becomes the most recent segment of the database. While the SSTable is being

written out to disk, writes can continue to a new memtable instance.

• In order to serve a read request, first try to find the key in the memtable, then in

the most recent on-disk segment, then in the next-older segment, etc.

• From time to time, run a merging and compaction process in the background to

combine segment files and to discard overwritten or deleted values.

This scheme works very well. It only suffers from one problem: if the database

crashes, the most recent writes (which are in the memtable but not yet written out to

disk) are lost. In order to avoid that problem, we can keep a separate log on disk to

which every write is immediately appended, just like in the previous section. That log

is not in sorted order, but that doesn’t matter, because its only purpose is to restore

the memtable after a crash. Every time the memtable is written out to an SSTable, the

corresponding log can be discarded.

Making an LSM-tree out of SSTables

The algorithm described here is essentially what is used in LevelDB [6] and RocksDB

[7], key-value storage engine libraries that are designed to be embedded into other

applications. Among other things, LevelDB can be used in Riak as an alternative to

Bitcask. Similar storage engines are used in Cassandra and HBase [8], both of which

were inspired by Google’s Bigtable paper [9] (which introduced the terms SSTable

and memtable).

Originally this indexing structure was described by Patrick O’Neil et al. under the

name Log-Structured Merge-Tree (or LSM-Tree) [10], building on earlier work on

78 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

log-structured filesystems [11]. Storage engines that are based on this principle of

merging and compacting sorted files are often called LSM storage engines.

Lucene, an indexing engine for full-text search used by Elasticsearch and Solr, uses a

similar method for storing its term dictionary [12, 13]. A full-text index is much more

complex than a key-value index but is based on a similar idea: given a word in a

search query, find all the documents (web pages, product descriptions, etc.) that

mention the word. This is implemented with a key-value structure where the key is a

word (a term) and the value is the list of IDs of all the documents that contain the

word (the postings list). In Lucene, this mapping from term to postings list is kept in

SSTable-like sorted files, which are merged in the background as needed [14].

Performance optimizations

As always, a lot of detail goes into making a storage engine perform well in practice.

For example, the LSM-tree algorithm can be slow when looking up keys that do not

exist in the database: you have to check the memtable, then the segments all the way

back to the oldest (possibly having to read from disk for each one) before you can be

sure that the key does not exist. In order to optimize this kind of access, storage

engines often use additional Bloom filters [15]. (A Bloom filter is a memory-efficient data structure for approximating the contents of a set. It can tell you if a key does not appear in the database, and thus saves many unnecessary disk reads for nonexistent

keys.)

There are also different strategies to determine the order and timing of how SSTables

are compacted and merged. The most common options are size-tiered and leveled

compaction. LevelDB and RocksDB use leveled compaction (hence the name of Lev‐

elDB), HBase uses size-tiered, and Cassandra supports both [16]. In size-tiered com‐

paction, newer and smaller SSTables are successively merged into older and larger

SSTables. In leveled compaction, the key range is split up into smaller SSTables and

older data is moved into separate “levels,” which allows the compaction to proceed

more incrementally and use less disk space.

Even though there are many subtleties, the basic idea of LSM-trees—keeping a cas‐

cade of SSTables that are merged in the background—is simple and effective. Even

when the dataset is much bigger than the available memory it continues to work well.

Since data is stored in sorted order, you can efficiently perform range queries (scan‐

ning all keys above some minimum and up to some maximum), and because the disk

writes are sequential the LSM-tree can support remarkably high write throughput.

B-Trees

The log-structured indexes we have discussed so far are gaining acceptance, but they

are not the most common type of index. The most widely used indexing structure is

quite different: the B-tree.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 79

Introduced in 1970 [17] and called “ubiquitous” less than 10 years later [18], B-trees

have stood the test of time very well. They remain the standard index implementation

in almost all relational databases, and many nonrelational databases use them too.

Like SSTables, B-trees keep key-value pairs sorted by key, which allows efficient key-

value lookups and range queries. But that’s where the similarity ends: B-trees have a

very different design philosophy.

The log-structured indexes we saw earlier break the database down into variable-size

segments, typically several megabytes or more in size, and always write a segment

sequentially. By contrast, B-trees break the database down into fixed-size blocks or

pages, traditionally 4 KB in size (sometimes bigger), and read or write one page at a

time. This design corresponds more closely to the underlying hardware, as disks are

also arranged in fixed-size blocks.

Each page can be identified using an address or location, which allows one page to

refer to another—similar to a pointer, but on disk instead of in memory. We can use

these page references to construct a tree of pages, as illustrated in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6. Looking up a key using a B-tree index.

One page is designated as the root of the B-tree; whenever you want to look up a key

in the index, you start here. The page contains several keys and references to child

pages. Each child is responsible for a continuous range of keys, and the keys between

the references indicate where the boundaries between those ranges lie.

In the example in Figure 3-6, we are looking for the key 251, so we know that we need

to follow the page reference between the boundaries 200 and 300. That takes us to a

similar-looking page that further breaks down the 200–300 range into subranges.

80 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

Eventually we get down to a page containing individual keys (a leaf page), which

either contains the value for each key inline or contains references to the pages where

the values can be found.

The number of references to child pages in one page of the B-tree is called the

branching factor. For example, in Figure 3-6 the branching factor is six. In practice, the branching factor depends on the amount of space required to store the page references and the range boundaries, but typically it is several hundred.

If you want to update the value for an existing key in a B-tree, you search for the leaf

page containing that key, change the value in that page, and write the page back to

disk (any references to that page remain valid). If you want to add a new key, you

need to find the page whose range encompasses the new key and add it to that page.

If there isn’t enough free space in the page to accommodate the new key, it is split

into two half-full pages, and the parent page is updated to account for the new subdi‐

vision of key ranges—see Figure 3-7. ii

Figure 3-7. Growing a B-tree by splitting a page.

This algorithm ensures that the tree remains balanced: a B-tree with n keys always

has a depth of O(log n). Most databases can fit into a B-tree that is three or four levels

deep, so you don’t need to follow many page references to find the page you are look‐

ing for. (A four-level tree of 4 KB pages with a branching factor of 500 can store up to

256 TB.)

ii. Inserting a new key into a B-tree is reasonably intuitive, but deleting one (while keeping the tree balanced) is somewhat more involved [2].

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 81

Making B-trees reliable

The basic underlying write operation of a B-tree is to overwrite a page on disk with

new data. It is assumed that the overwrite does not change the location of the page;

i.e., all references to that page remain intact when the page is overwritten. This is in

stark contrast to log-structured indexes such as LSM-trees, which only append to files

(and eventually delete obsolete files) but never modify files in place.

You can think of overwriting a page on disk as an actual hardware operation. On a

magnetic hard drive, this means moving the disk head to the right place, waiting for

the right position on the spinning platter to come around, and then overwriting the

appropriate sector with new data. On SSDs, what happens is somewhat more compli‐

cated, due to the fact that an SSD must erase and rewrite fairly large blocks of a stor‐

age chip at a time [19].

Moreover, some operations require several different pages to be overwritten. For

example, if you split a page because an insertion caused it to be overfull, you need to

write the two pages that were split, and also overwrite their parent page to update the

references to the two child pages. This is a dangerous operation, because if the data‐

base crashes after only some of the pages have been written, you end up with a cor‐

rupted index (e.g., there may be an orphan page that is not a child of any parent).

In order to make the database resilient to crashes, it is common for B-tree implemen‐

tations to include an additional data structure on disk: a write-ahead log (WAL, also

known as a redo log). This is an append-only file to which every B-tree modification

must be written before it can be applied to the pages of the tree itself. When the data‐

base comes back up after a crash, this log is used to restore the B-tree back to a con‐

sistent state [5, 20].

An additional complication of updating pages in place is that careful concurrency

control is required if multiple threads are going to access the B-tree at the same time

—otherwise a thread may see the tree in an inconsistent state. This is typically done

by protecting the tree’s data structures with latches (lightweight locks). Log-

structured approaches are simpler in this regard, because they do all the merging in

the background without interfering with incoming queries and atomically swap old

segments for new segments from time to time.

B-tree optimizations

As B-trees have been around for so long, it’s not surprising that many optimizations

have been developed over the years. To mention just a few:

• Instead of overwriting pages and maintaining a WAL for crash recovery, some

databases (like LMDB) use a copy-on-write scheme [21]. A modified page is

written to a different location, and a new version of the parent pages in the tree is

created, pointing at the new location. This approach is also useful for concur‐

82 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

rency control, as we shall see in “Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read” on

page 237.

• We can save space in pages by not storing the entire key, but abbreviating it.

Especially in pages on the interior of the tree, keys only need to provide enough

information to act as boundaries between key ranges. Packing more keys into a

page allows the tree to have a higher branching factor, and thus fewer levels.iii

• In general, pages can be positioned anywhere on disk; there is nothing requiring

pages with nearby key ranges to be nearby on disk. If a query needs to scan over a

large part of the key range in sorted order, that page-by-page layout can be ineffi‐

cient, because a disk seek may be required for every page that is read. Many B-

tree implementations therefore try to lay out the tree so that leaf pages appear in

sequential order on disk. However, it’s difficult to maintain that order as the tree

grows. By contrast, since LSM-trees rewrite large segments of the storage in one

go during merging, it’s easier for them to keep sequential keys close to each other

on disk.

• Additional pointers have been added to the tree. For example, each leaf page may

have references to its sibling pages to the left and right, which allows scanning

keys in order without jumping back to parent pages.

• B-tree variants such as fractal trees [22] borrow some log-structured ideas to

reduce disk seeks (and they have nothing to do with fractals).

Comparing B-Trees and LSM-Trees

Even though B-tree implementations are generally more mature than LSM-tree

implementations, LSM-trees are also interesting due to their performance character‐

istics. As a rule of thumb, LSM-trees are typically faster for writes, whereas B-trees

are thought to be faster for reads [23]. Reads are typically slower on LSM-trees

because they have to check several different data structures and SSTables at different

stages of compaction.

However, benchmarks are often inconclusive and sensitive to details of the workload.

You need to test systems with your particular workload in order to make a valid com‐

parison. In this section we will briefly discuss a few things that are worth considering

when measuring the performance of a storage engine.

iii. This variant is sometimes known as a B+ tree, although the optimization is so common that it often isn’t distinguished from other B-tree variants.

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 83

Advantages of LSM-trees

A B-tree index must write every piece of data at least twice: once to the write-ahead

log, and once to the tree page itself (and perhaps again as pages are split). There is

also overhead from having to write an entire page at a time, even if only a few bytes in

that page changed. Some storage engines even overwrite the same page twice in order

to avoid ending up with a partially updated page in the event of a power failure [24,

25].

Log-structured indexes also rewrite data multiple times due to repeated compaction

and merging of SSTables. This effect—one write to the database resulting in multiple

writes to the disk over the course of the database’s lifetime—is known as write ampli‐

fication. It is of particular concern on SSDs, which can only overwrite blocks a limi‐

ted number of times before wearing out.

In write-heavy applications, the performance bottleneck might be the rate at which

the database can write to disk. In this case, write amplification has a direct perfor‐

mance cost: the more that a storage engine writes to disk, the fewer writes per second

it can handle within the available disk bandwidth.

Moreover, LSM-trees are typically able to sustain higher write throughput than B-

trees, partly because they sometimes have lower write amplification (although this

depends on the storage engine configuration and workload), and partly because they

sequentially write compact SSTable files rather than having to overwrite several pages

in the tree [26]. This difference is particularly important on magnetic hard drives,

where sequential writes are much faster than random writes.

LSM-trees can be compressed better, and thus often produce smaller files on disk

than B-trees. B-tree storage engines leave some disk space unused due to fragmenta‐

tion: when a page is split or when a row cannot fit into an existing page, some space

in a page remains unused. Since LSM-trees are not page-oriented and periodically

rewrite SSTables to remove fragmentation, they have lower storage overheads, espe‐

cially when using leveled compaction [27].

On many SSDs, the firmware internally uses a log-structured algorithm to turn ran‐

dom writes into sequential writes on the underlying storage chips, so the impact of

the storage engine’s write pattern is less pronounced [19]. However, lower write

amplification and reduced fragmentation are still advantageous on SSDs: represent‐

ing data more compactly allows more read and write requests within the available I/O

bandwidth.

Downsides of LSM-trees

A downside of log-structured storage is that the compaction process can sometimes

interfere with the performance of ongoing reads and writes. Even though storage

engines try to perform compaction incrementally and without affecting concurrent

84 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

access, disks have limited resources, so it can easily happen that a request needs to

wait while the disk finishes an expensive compaction operation. The impact on

throughput and average response time is usually small, but at higher percentiles (see

“Describing Performance” on page 13) the response time of queries to log-structured

storage engines can sometimes be quite high, and B-trees can be more predictable

[28].

Another issue with compaction arises at high write throughput: the disk’s finite write

bandwidth needs to be shared between the initial write (logging and flushing a

memtable to disk) and the compaction threads running in the background. When

writing to an empty database, the full disk bandwidth can be used for the initial write,

but the bigger the database gets, the more disk bandwidth is required for compaction.

If write throughput is high and compaction is not configured carefully, it can happen

that compaction cannot keep up with the rate of incoming writes. In this case, the

number of unmerged segments on disk keeps growing until you run out of disk

space, and reads also slow down because they need to check more segment files. Typ‐

ically, SSTable-based storage engines do not throttle the rate of incoming writes, even

if compaction cannot keep up, so you need explicit monitoring to detect this situa‐

tion [29, 30].

An advantage of B-trees is that each key exists in exactly one place in the index,

whereas a log-structured storage engine may have multiple copies of the same key in

different segments. This aspect makes B-trees attractive in databases that want to

offer strong transactional semantics: in many relational databases, transaction isola‐

tion is implemented using locks on ranges of keys, and in a B-tree index, those locks

can be directly attached to the tree [5]. In Chapter 7 we will discuss this point in more detail.

B-trees are very ingrained in the architecture of databases and provide consistently

good performance for many workloads, so it’s unlikely that they will go away anytime

soon. In new datastores, log-structured indexes are becoming increasingly popular.

There is no quick and easy rule for determining which type of storage engine is better

for your use case, so it is worth testing empirically.

Other Indexing Structures

So far we have only discussed key-value indexes, which are like a primary key index in

the relational model. A primary key uniquely identifies one row in a relational table,

or one document in a document database, or one vertex in a graph database. Other

records in the database can refer to that row/document/vertex by its primary key (or

ID), and the index is used to resolve such references.

It is also very common to have secondary indexes. In relational databases, you can

create several secondary indexes on the same table using the CREATE INDEX com‐

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 85

mand, and they are often crucial for performing joins efficiently. For example, in

Figure 2-1 in Chapter 2 you would most likely have a secondary index on the

user_id columns so that you can find all the rows belonging to the same user in each

of the tables.

A secondary index can easily be constructed from a key-value index. The main differ‐

ence is that keys are not unique; i.e., there might be many rows (documents, vertices)

with the same key. This can be solved in two ways: either by making each value in the

index a list of matching row identifiers (like a postings list in a full-text index) or by

making each key unique by appending a row identifier to it. Either way, both B-trees

and log-structured indexes can be used as secondary indexes.

Storing values within the index

The key in an index is the thing that queries search for, but the value can be one of

two things: it could be the actual row (document, vertex) in question, or it could be a

reference to the row stored elsewhere. In the latter case, the place where rows are

stored is known as a heap file, and it stores data in no particular order (it may be

append-only, or it may keep track of deleted rows in order to overwrite them with

new data later). The heap file approach is common because it avoids duplicating data

when multiple secondary indexes are present: each index just references a location in

the heap file, and the actual data is kept in one place.

When updating a value without changing the key, the heap file approach can be quite

efficient: the record can be overwritten in place, provided that the new value is not

larger than the old value. The situation is more complicated if the new value is larger,

as it probably needs to be moved to a new location in the heap where there is enough

space. In that case, either all indexes need to be updated to point at the new heap

location of the record, or a forwarding pointer is left behind in the old heap location

[5].

In some situations, the extra hop from the index to the heap file is too much of a per‐

formance penalty for reads, so it can be desirable to store the indexed row directly

within an index. This is known as a clustered index. For example, in MySQL’s

InnoDB storage engine, the primary key of a table is always a clustered index, and

secondary indexes refer to the primary key (rather than a heap file location) [31]. In

SQL Server, you can specify one clustered index per table [32].

A compromise between a clustered index (storing all row data within the index) and

a nonclustered index (storing only references to the data within the index) is known

as a covering index or index with included columns, which stores some of a table’s columns within the index [33]. This allows some queries to be answered by using the

index alone (in which case, the index is said to cover the query) [32].

86 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

As with any kind of duplication of data, clustered and covering indexes can speed up

reads, but they require additional storage and can add overhead on writes. Databases

also need to go to additional effort to enforce transactional guarantees, because appli‐

cations should not see inconsistencies due to the duplication.

Multi-column indexes

The indexes discussed so far only map a single key to a value. That is not sufficient if

we need to query multiple columns of a table (or multiple fields in a document)

simultaneously.

The most common type of multi-column index is called a concatenated index, which

simply combines several fields into one key by appending one column to another (the

index definition specifies in which order the fields are concatenated). This is like an

old-fashioned paper phone book, which provides an index from ( lastname, first‐

name) to phone number. Due to the sort order, the index can be used to find all the

people with a particular last name, or all the people with a particular lastname-

firstname combination. However, the index is useless if you want to find all the peo‐

ple with a particular first name.

Multi-dimensional indexes are a more general way of querying several columns at

once, which is particularly important for geospatial data. For example, a restaurant-

search website may have a database containing the latitude and longitude of each res‐

taurant. When a user is looking at the restaurants on a map, the website needs to

search for all the restaurants within the rectangular map area that the user is cur‐

rently viewing. This requires a two-dimensional range query like the following:

SELECT * FROM restaurants WHERE latitude > 51.4946 AND latitude < 51.5079

AND longitude > -0.1162 AND longitude < -0.1004;

A standard B-tree or LSM-tree index is not able to answer that kind of query effi‐

ciently: it can give you either all the restaurants in a range of latitudes (but at any lon‐

gitude), or all the restaurants in a range of longitudes (but anywhere between the

North and South poles), but not both simultaneously.

One option is to translate a two-dimensional location into a single number using a

space-filling curve, and then to use a regular B-tree index [34]. More commonly, spe‐

cialized spatial indexes such as R-trees are used. For example, PostGIS implements

geospatial indexes as R-trees using PostgreSQL’s Generalized Search Tree indexing

facility [35]. We don’t have space to describe R-trees in detail here, but there is plenty of literature on them.

An interesting idea is that multi-dimensional indexes are not just for geographic

locations. For example, on an ecommerce website you could use a three-dimensional

index on the dimensions ( red, green, blue) to search for products in a certain range of colors, or in a database of weather observations you could have a two-dimensional Data Structures That Power Your Database | 87

index on ( date, temperature) in order to efficiently search for all the observations during the year 2013 where the temperature was between 25 and 30℃. With a one-dimensional index, you would have to either scan over all the records from 2013

(regardless of temperature) and then filter them by temperature, or vice versa. A 2D

index could narrow down by timestamp and temperature simultaneously. This tech‐

nique is used by HyperDex [36].

Full-text search and fuzzy indexes

All the indexes discussed so far assume that you have exact data and allow you to

query for exact values of a key, or a range of values of a key with a sort order. What

they don’t allow you to do is search for similar keys, such as misspelled words. Such

fuzzy querying requires different techniques.

For example, full-text search engines commonly allow a search for one word to be

expanded to include synonyms of the word, to ignore grammatical variations of

words, and to search for occurrences of words near each other in the same document,

and support various other features that depend on linguistic analysis of the text. To

cope with typos in documents or queries, Lucene is able to search text for words

within a certain edit distance (an edit distance of 1 means that one letter has been

added, removed, or replaced) [37].

As mentioned in “Making an LSM-tree out of SSTables” on page 78, Lucene uses a

SSTable-like structure for its term dictionary. This structure requires a small in-

memory index that tells queries at which offset in the sorted file they need to look for

a key. In LevelDB, this in-memory index is a sparse collection of some of the keys,

but in Lucene, the in-memory index is a finite state automaton over the characters in

the keys, similar to a trie [38]. This automaton can be transformed into a Levenshtein automaton, which supports efficient search for words within a given edit distance [39].

Other fuzzy search techniques go in the direction of document classification and

machine learning. See an information retrieval textbook for more detail [e.g., 40].

Keeping everything in memory

The data structures discussed so far in this chapter have all been answers to the limi‐

tations of disks. Compared to main memory, disks are awkward to deal with. With

both magnetic disks and SSDs, data on disk needs to be laid out carefully if you want

good performance on reads and writes. However, we tolerate this awkwardness

because disks have two significant advantages: they are durable (their contents are

not lost if the power is turned off), and they have a lower cost per gigabyte than

RAM.

As RAM becomes cheaper, the cost-per-gigabyte argument is eroded. Many datasets

are simply not that big, so it’s quite feasible to keep them entirely in memory, poten‐

88 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

tially distributed across several machines. This has led to the development of in-

memory databases.

Some in-memory key-value stores, such as Memcached, are intended for caching use

only, where it’s acceptable for data to be lost if a machine is restarted. But other in-

memory databases aim for durability, which can be achieved with special hardware

(such as battery-powered RAM), by writing a log of changes to disk, by writing peri‐

odic snapshots to disk, or by replicating the in-memory state to other machines.

When an in-memory database is restarted, it needs to reload its state, either from disk

or over the network from a replica (unless special hardware is used). Despite writing

to disk, it’s still an in-memory database, because the disk is merely used as an

append-only log for durability, and reads are served entirely from memory. Writing

to disk also has operational advantages: files on disk can easily be backed up,

inspected, and analyzed by external utilities.

Products such as VoltDB, MemSQL, and Oracle TimesTen are in-memory databases

with a relational model, and the vendors claim that they can offer big performance

improvements by removing all the overheads associated with managing on-disk data

structures [41, 42]. RAMCloud is an open source, in-memory key-value store with

durability (using a log-structured approach for the data in memory as well as the data

on disk) [43]. Redis and Couchbase provide weak durability by writing to disk asyn‐

chronously.

Counterintuitively, the performance advantage of in-memory databases is not due to

the fact that they don’t need to read from disk. Even a disk-based storage engine may

never need to read from disk if you have enough memory, because the operating sys‐

tem caches recently used disk blocks in memory anyway. Rather, they can be faster

because they can avoid the overheads of encoding in-memory data structures in a

form that can be written to disk [44].

Besides performance, another interesting area for in-memory databases is providing

data models that are difficult to implement with disk-based indexes. For example,

Redis offers a database-like interface to various data structures such as priority

queues and sets. Because it keeps all data in memory, its implementation is compara‐

tively simple.

Recent research indicates that an in-memory database architecture could be extended

to support datasets larger than the available memory, without bringing back the over‐

heads of a disk-centric architecture [45]. The so-called anti-caching approach works by evicting the least recently used data from memory to disk when there is not enough memory, and loading it back into memory when it is accessed again in the

future. This is similar to what operating systems do with virtual memory and swap

files, but the database can manage memory more efficiently than the OS, as it can

work at the granularity of individual records rather than entire memory pages. This

Data Structures That Power Your Database | 89

approach still requires indexes to fit entirely in memory, though (like the Bitcask

example at the beginning of the chapter).

Further changes to storage engine design will probably be needed if non-volatile

memory (NVM) technologies become more widely adopted [46]. At present, this is a

new area of research, but it is worth keeping an eye on in the future.

Transaction Processing or Analytics?

In the early days of business data processing, a write to the database typically corre‐

sponded to a commercial transaction taking place: making a sale, placing an order

with a supplier, paying an employee’s salary, etc. As databases expanded into areas

that didn’t involve money changing hands, the term transaction nevertheless stuck,

referring to a group of reads and writes that form a logical unit.

A transaction needn’t necessarily have ACID (atomicity, consis‐

tency, isolation, and durability) properties. Transaction processing

just means allowing clients to make low-latency reads and writes—

as opposed to batch processing jobs, which only run periodically

(for example, once per day). We discuss the ACID properties in

Chapter 7 and batch processing in Chapter 10.

Even though databases started being used for many different kinds of data—com‐

ments on blog posts, actions in a game, contacts in an address book, etc.—the basic

access pattern remained similar to processing business transactions. An application

typically looks up a small number of records by some key, using an index. Records

are inserted or updated based on the user’s input. Because these applications are

interactive, the access pattern became known as online transaction processing

(OLTP).

However, databases also started being increasingly used for data analytics, which has

very different access patterns. Usually an analytic query needs to scan over a huge

number of records, only reading a few columns per record, and calculates aggregate

statistics (such as count, sum, or average) rather than returning the raw data to the

user. For example, if your data is a table of sales transactions, then analytic queries

might be:

• What was the total revenue of each of our stores in January?

• How many more bananas than usual did we sell during our latest promotion?

• Which brand of baby food is most often purchased together with brand X

diapers?

90 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

These queries are often written by business analysts, and feed into reports that help

the management of a company make better decisions ( business intelligence). In order

to differentiate this pattern of using databases from transaction processing, it has

been called online analytic processing (OLAP) [47]. iv The difference between OLTP

and OLAP is not always clear-cut, but some typical characteristics are listed in

Table 3-1.

Table 3-1. Comparing characteristics of transaction processing versus analytic systems

Property

Transaction processing systems (OLTP)

Analytic systems (OLAP)

Main read pattern

Small number of records per query, fetched by key

Aggregate over large number of records

Main write pattern

Random-access, low-latency writes from user input

Bulk import (ETL) or event stream

Primarily used by

End user/customer, via web application

Internal analyst, for decision support

What data represents

Latest state of data (current point in time)

History of events that happened over time

Dataset size

Gigabytes to terabytes

Terabytes to petabytes

At first, the same databases were used for both transaction processing and analytic

queries. SQL turned out to be quite flexible in this regard: it works well for OLTP-

type queries as well as OLAP-type queries. Nevertheless, in the late 1980s and early

1990s, there was a trend for companies to stop using their OLTP systems for analytics

purposes, and to run the analytics on a separate database instead. This separate data‐

base was called a data warehouse.

Data Warehousing

An enterprise may have dozens of different transaction processing systems: systems

powering the customer-facing website, controlling point of sale (checkout) systems in

physical stores, tracking inventory in warehouses, planning routes for vehicles, man‐

aging suppliers, administering employees, etc. Each of these systems is complex and

needs a team of people to maintain it, so the systems end up operating mostly auton‐

omously from each other.

These OLTP systems are usually expected to be highly available and to process trans‐

actions with low latency, since they are often critical to the operation of the business.

Database administrators therefore closely guard their OLTP databases. They are usu‐

ally reluctant to let business analysts run ad hoc analytic queries on an OLTP data‐

base, since those queries are often expensive, scanning large parts of the dataset,

which can harm the performance of concurrently executing transactions.

iv. The meaning of online in OLAP is unclear; it probably refers to the fact that queries are not just for prede-fined reports, but that analysts use the OLAP system interactively for explorative queries.

Transaction Processing or Analytics? | 91

A data warehouse, by contrast, is a separate database that analysts can query to their

hearts’ content, without affecting OLTP operations [48]. The data warehouse con‐

tains a read-only copy of the data in all the various OLTP systems in the company.

Data is extracted from OLTP databases (using either a periodic data dump or a con‐

tinuous stream of updates), transformed into an analysis-friendly schema, cleaned

up, and then loaded into the data warehouse. This process of getting data into the

warehouse is known as Extract–Transform–Load (ETL) and is illustrated in

Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8. Simplified outline of ETL into a data warehouse.

Data warehouses now exist in almost all large enterprises, but in small companies

they are almost unheard of. This is probably because most small companies don’t

have so many different OLTP systems, and most small companies have a small

amount of data—small enough that it can be queried in a conventional SQL database,

or even analyzed in a spreadsheet. In a large company, a lot of heavy lifting is

required to do something that is simple in a small company.

A big advantage of using a separate data warehouse, rather than querying OLTP sys‐

tems directly for analytics, is that the data warehouse can be optimized for analytic

access patterns. It turns out that the indexing algorithms discussed in the first half of

this chapter work well for OLTP, but are not very good at answering analytic queries.

92 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

In the rest of this chapter we will look at storage engines that are optimized for ana‐

lytics instead.

The divergence between OLTP databases and data warehouses

The data model of a data warehouse is most commonly relational, because SQL is

generally a good fit for analytic queries. There are many graphical data analysis tools

that generate SQL queries, visualize the results, and allow analysts to explore the data

(through operations such as drill-down and slicing and dicing).

On the surface, a data warehouse and a relational OLTP database look similar,

because they both have a SQL query interface. However, the internals of the systems

can look quite different, because they are optimized for very different query patterns.

Many database vendors now focus on supporting either transaction processing or

analytics workloads, but not both.

Some databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA, have support for

transaction processing and data warehousing in the same product. However, they are

increasingly becoming two separate storage and query engines, which happen to be

accessible through a common SQL interface [49, 50, 51].

Data warehouse vendors such as Teradata, Vertica, SAP HANA, and ParAccel typi‐

cally sell their systems under expensive commercial licenses. Amazon RedShift is a

hosted version of ParAccel. More recently, a plethora of open source SQL-on-

Hadoop projects have emerged; they are young but aiming to compete with commer‐

cial data warehouse systems. These include Apache Hive, Spark SQL, Cloudera

Impala, Facebook Presto, Apache Tajo, and Apache Drill [52, 53]. Some of them are

based on ideas from Google’s Dremel [54].

Stars and Snowflakes: Schemas for Analytics

As explored in Chapter 2, a wide range of different data models are used in the realm

of transaction processing, depending on the needs of the application. On the other

hand, in analytics, there is much less diversity of data models. Many data warehouses

are used in a fairly formulaic style, known as a star schema (also known as dimen‐

sional modeling [55]).

The example schema in Figure 3-9 shows a data warehouse that might be found at a

grocery retailer. At the center of the schema is a so-called fact table (in this example,

it is called fact_sales). Each row of the fact table represents an event that occurred

at a particular time (here, each row represents a customer’s purchase of a product). If

we were analyzing website traffic rather than retail sales, each row might represent a

page view or a click by a user.

Transaction Processing or Analytics? | 93

Figure 3-9. Example of a star schema for use in a data warehouse.

Usually, facts are captured as individual events, because this allows maximum flexi‐

bility of analysis later. However, this means that the fact table can become extremely

large. A big enterprise like Apple, Walmart, or eBay may have tens of petabytes of

transaction history in its data warehouse, most of which is in fact tables [56].

Some of the columns in the fact table are attributes, such as the price at which the

product was sold and the cost of buying it from the supplier (allowing the profit mar‐

gin to be calculated). Other columns in the fact table are foreign key references to

other tables, called dimension tables. As each row in the fact table represents an event,

the dimensions represent the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the event.

For example, in Figure 3-9, one of the dimensions is the product that was sold. Each

row in the dim_product table represents one type of product that is for sale, including

94 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

its stock-keeping unit (SKU), description, brand name, category, fat content, package

size, etc. Each row in the fact_sales table uses a foreign key to indicate which prod‐

uct was sold in that particular transaction. (For simplicity, if the customer buys sev‐

eral different products at once, they are represented as separate rows in the fact

table.)

Even date and time are often represented using dimension tables, because this allows

additional information about dates (such as public holidays) to be encoded, allowing

queries to differentiate between sales on holidays and non-holidays.

The name “star schema” comes from the fact that when the table relationships are

visualized, the fact table is in the middle, surrounded by its dimension tables; the

connections to these tables are like the rays of a star.

A variation of this template is known as the snowflake schema, where dimensions are

further broken down into subdimensions. For example, there could be separate tables

for brands and product categories, and each row in the dim_product table could ref‐

erence the brand and category as foreign keys, rather than storing them as strings in

the dim_product table. Snowflake schemas are more normalized than star schemas,

but star schemas are often preferred because they are simpler for analysts to work

with [55].

In a typical data warehouse, tables are often very wide: fact tables often have over 100

columns, sometimes several hundred [51]. Dimension tables can also be very wide, as

they include all the metadata that may be relevant for analysis—for example, the

dim_store table may include details of which services are offered at each store,

whether it has an in-store bakery, the square footage, the date when the store was first

opened, when it was last remodeled, how far it is from the nearest highway, etc.

Column-Oriented Storage

If you have trillions of rows and petabytes of data in your fact tables, storing and

querying them efficiently becomes a challenging problem. Dimension tables are usu‐

ally much smaller (millions of rows), so in this section we will concentrate primarily

on storage of facts.

Although fact tables are often over 100 columns wide, a typical data warehouse query

only accesses 4 or 5 of them at one time ("SELECT *" queries are rarely needed for

analytics) [51]. Take the query in Example 3-1: it accesses a large number of rows

(every occurrence of someone buying fruit or candy during the 2013 calendar year),

but it only needs to access three columns of the fact_sales table: date_key,

product_sk, and quantity. The query ignores all other columns.

Column-Oriented Storage | 95

Example 3-1. Analyzing whether people are more inclined to buy fresh fruit or candy,

depending on the day of the week

SELECT

dim_date.weekday, dim_product.category,

SUM(fact_sales.quantity) AS quantity_sold

FROM fact_sales

JOIN dim_date ON fact_sales.date_key = dim_date.date_key

JOIN dim_product ON fact_sales.product_sk = dim_product.product_sk

WHERE

dim_date. year = 2013 AND

dim_product.category IN ('Fresh fruit', 'Candy')

GROUP BY

dim_date.weekday, dim_product.category;

How can we execute this query efficiently?

In most OLTP databases, storage is laid out in a row-oriented fashion: all the values

from one row of a table are stored next to each other. Document databases are simi‐

lar: an entire document is typically stored as one contiguous sequence of bytes. You

can see this in the CSV example of Figure 3-1.

In order to process a query like Example 3-1, you may have indexes on

fact_sales.date_key and/or fact_sales.product_sk that tell the storage engine

where to find all the sales for a particular date or for a particular product. But then, a

row-oriented storage engine still needs to load all of those rows (each consisting of

over 100 attributes) from disk into memory, parse them, and filter out those that

don’t meet the required conditions. That can take a long time.

The idea behind column-oriented storage is simple: don’t store all the values from one

row together, but store all the values from each column together instead. If each col‐

umn is stored in a separate file, a query only needs to read and parse those columns

that are used in that query, which can save a lot of work. This principle is illustrated

in Figure 3-10.

Column storage is easiest to understand in a relational data model,

but it applies equally to nonrelational data. For example, Parquet

[57] is a columnar storage format that supports a document data

model, based on Google’s Dremel [54].

96 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

Figure 3-10. Storing relational data by column, rather than by row.

The column-oriented storage layout relies on each column file containing the rows in

the same order. Thus, if you need to reassemble an entire row, you can take the 23rd

entry from each of the individual column files and put them together to form the

23rd row of the table.

Column Compression

Besides only loading those columns from disk that are required for a query, we can

further reduce the demands on disk throughput by compressing data. Fortunately,

column-oriented storage often lends itself very well to compression.

Take a look at the sequences of values for each column in Figure 3-10: they often look

quite repetitive, which is a good sign for compression. Depending on the data in the

column, different compression techniques can be used. One technique that is particu‐

larly effective in data warehouses is bitmap encoding, illustrated in Figure 3-11.

Column-Oriented Storage | 97

Figure 3-11. Compressed, bitmap-indexed storage of a single column.

Often, the number of distinct values in a column is small compared to the number of

rows (for example, a retailer may have billions of sales transactions, but only 100,000

distinct products). We can now take a column with n distinct values and turn it into

n separate bitmaps: one bitmap for each distinct value, with one bit for each row. The

bit is 1 if the row has that value, and 0 if not.

If n is very small (for example, a country column may have approximately 200 dis‐

tinct values), those bitmaps can be stored with one bit per row. But if n is bigger,

there will be a lot of zeros in most of the bitmaps (we say that they are sparse). In that

case, the bitmaps can additionally be run-length encoded, as shown at the bottom of

Figure 3-11. This can make the encoding of a column remarkably compact.

Bitmap indexes such as these are very well suited for the kinds of queries that are

common in a data warehouse. For example:

WHERE product_sk IN (30, 68, 69):

Load the three bitmaps for product_sk = 30, product_sk = 68, and product_sk

= 69, and calculate the bitwise OR of the three bitmaps, which can be done very

efficiently.

98 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

WHERE product_sk = 31 AND store_sk = 3:

Load the bitmaps for product_sk = 31 and store_sk = 3, and calculate the bit‐

wise AND. This works because the columns contain the rows in the same order,

so the k th bit in one column’s bitmap corresponds to the same row as the k th bit

in another column’s bitmap.

There are also various other compression schemes for different kinds of data, but we

won’t go into them in detail—see [58] for an overview.

Column-oriented storage and column families

Cassandra and HBase have a concept of column families, which

they inherited from Bigtable [9]. However, it is very misleading to

call them column-oriented: within each column family, they store

all columns from a row together, along with a row key, and they do

not use column compression. Thus, the Bigtable model is still

mostly row-oriented.

Memory bandwidth and vectorized processing

For data warehouse queries that need to scan over millions of rows, a big bottleneck

is the bandwidth for getting data from disk into memory. However, that is not the

only bottleneck. Developers of analytical databases also worry about efficiently using

the bandwidth from main memory into the CPU cache, avoiding branch mispredic‐

tions and bubbles in the CPU instruction processing pipeline, and making use of

single-instruction-multi-data (SIMD) instructions in modern CPUs [59, 60].

Besides reducing the volume of data that needs to be loaded from disk, column-

oriented storage layouts are also good for making efficient use of CPU cycles. For

example, the query engine can take a chunk of compressed column data that fits

comfortably in the CPU’s L1 cache and iterate through it in a tight loop (that is, with

no function calls). A CPU can execute such a loop much faster than code that

requires a lot of function calls and conditions for each record that is processed. Col‐

umn compression allows more rows from a column to fit in the same amount of L1

cache. Operators, such as the bitwise AND and OR described previously, can be

designed to operate on such chunks of compressed column data directly. This techni‐

que is known as vectorized processing [58, 49].

Sort Order in Column Storage

In a column store, it doesn’t necessarily matter in which order the rows are stored.

It’s easiest to store them in the order in which they were inserted, since then inserting

a new row just means appending to each of the column files. However, we can choose

to impose an order, like we did with SSTables previously, and use that as an indexing

mechanism.

Column-Oriented Storage | 99

Note that it wouldn’t make sense to sort each column independently, because then

we would no longer know which items in the columns belong to the same row. We

can only reconstruct a row because we know that the k th item in one column belongs

to the same row as the k th item in another column.

Rather, the data needs to be sorted an entire row at a time, even though it is stored by

column. The administrator of the database can choose the columns by which the

table should be sorted, using their knowledge of common queries. For example, if

queries often target date ranges, such as the last month, it might make sense to make

date_key the first sort key. Then the query optimizer can scan only the rows from the

last month, which will be much faster than scanning all rows.

A second column can determine the sort order of any rows that have the same value

in the first column. For example, if date_key is the first sort key in Figure 3-10, it

might make sense for product_sk to be the second sort key so that all sales for the

same product on the same day are grouped together in storage. That will help queries

that need to group or filter sales by product within a certain date range.

Another advantage of sorted order is that it can help with compression of columns. If

the primary sort column does not have many distinct values, then after sorting, it will

have long sequences where the same value is repeated many times in a row. A simple

run-length encoding, like we used for the bitmaps in Figure 3-11, could compress

that column down to a few kilobytes—even if the table has billions of rows.

That compression effect is strongest on the first sort key. The second and third sort

keys will be more jumbled up, and thus not have such long runs of repeated values.

Columns further down the sorting priority appear in essentially random order, so

they probably won’t compress as well. But having the first few columns sorted is still

a win overall.

Several different sort orders

A clever extension of this idea was introduced in C-Store and adopted in the com‐

mercial data warehouse Vertica [61, 62]. Different queries benefit from different sort

orders, so why not store the same data sorted in several different ways? Data needs to

be replicated to multiple machines anyway, so that you don’t lose data if one machine

fails. You might as well store that redundant data sorted in different ways so that

when you’re processing a query, you can use the version that best fits the query

pattern.

Having multiple sort orders in a column-oriented store is a bit similar to having mul‐

tiple secondary indexes in a row-oriented store. But the big difference is that the row-

oriented store keeps every row in one place (in the heap file or a clustered index), and

secondary indexes just contain pointers to the matching rows. In a column store,

there normally aren’t any pointers to data elsewhere, only columns containing values.

100 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

Writing to Column-Oriented Storage

These optimizations make sense in data warehouses, because most of the load con‐

sists of large read-only queries run by analysts. Column-oriented storage, compres‐

sion, and sorting all help to make those read queries faster. However, they have the

downside of making writes more difficult.

An update-in-place approach, like B-trees use, is not possible with compressed col‐

umns. If you wanted to insert a row in the middle of a sorted table, you would most

likely have to rewrite all the column files. As rows are identified by their position

within a column, the insertion has to update all columns consistently.

Fortunately, we have already seen a good solution earlier in this chapter: LSM-trees.

All writes first go to an in-memory store, where they are added to a sorted structure

and prepared for writing to disk. It doesn’t matter whether the in-memory store is

row-oriented or column-oriented. When enough writes have accumulated, they are

merged with the column files on disk and written to new files in bulk. This is essen‐

tially what Vertica does [62].

Queries need to examine both the column data on disk and the recent writes in mem‐

ory, and combine the two. However, the query optimizer hides this distinction from

the user. From an analyst’s point of view, data that has been modified with inserts,

updates, or deletes is immediately reflected in subsequent queries.

Aggregation: Data Cubes and Materialized Views

Not every data warehouse is necessarily a column store: traditional row-oriented

databases and a few other architectures are also used. However, columnar storage can

be significantly faster for ad hoc analytical queries, so it is rapidly gaining popularity

[51, 63].

Another aspect of data warehouses that is worth mentioning briefly is materialized

aggregates. As discussed earlier, data warehouse queries often involve an aggregate

function, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, or MAX in SQL. If the same aggregates are used

by many different queries, it can be wasteful to crunch through the raw data every

time. Why not cache some of the counts or sums that queries use most often?

One way of creating such a cache is a materialized view. In a relational data model, it

is often defined like a standard (virtual) view: a table-like object whose contents are

the results of some query. The difference is that a materialized view is an actual copy

of the query results, written to disk, whereas a virtual view is just a shortcut for writ‐

ing queries. When you read from a virtual view, the SQL engine expands it into the

view’s underlying query on the fly and then processes the expanded query.

When the underlying data changes, a materialized view needs to be updated, because

it is a denormalized copy of the data. The database can do that automatically, but

Column-Oriented Storage | 101

such updates make writes more expensive, which is why materialized views are not

often used in OLTP databases. In read-heavy data warehouses they can make more

sense (whether or not they actually improve read performance depends on the indi‐

vidual case).

A common special case of a materialized view is known as a data cube or OLAP cube

[64]. It is a grid of aggregates grouped by different dimensions. Figure 3-12 shows an example.

Figure 3-12. Two dimensions of a data cube, aggregating data by summing.

Imagine for now that each fact has foreign keys to only two dimension tables—in

Figure 3-12, these are date and product. You can now draw a two-dimensional table, with dates along one axis and products along the other. Each cell contains the aggregate (e.g., SUM) of an attribute (e.g., net_price) of all facts with that date-product combination. Then you can apply the same aggregate along each row or column and

get a summary that has been reduced by one dimension (the sales by product regard‐

less of date, or the sales by date regardless of product).

In general, facts often have more than two dimensions. In Figure 3-9 there are five

dimensions: date, product, store, promotion, and customer. It’s a lot harder to imag‐

ine what a five-dimensional hypercube would look like, but the principle remains the

same: each cell contains the sales for a particular date-product-store-promotion-

customer combination. These values can then repeatedly be summarized along each

of the dimensions.

The advantage of a materialized data cube is that certain queries become very fast

because they have effectively been precomputed. For example, if you want to know

102 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

the total sales per store yesterday, you just need to look at the totals along the appro‐

priate dimension—no need to scan millions of rows.

The disadvantage is that a data cube doesn’t have the same flexibility as querying the

raw data. For example, there is no way of calculating which proportion of sales comes

from items that cost more than $100, because the price isn’t one of the dimensions.

Most data warehouses therefore try to keep as much raw data as possible, and use

aggregates such as data cubes only as a performance boost for certain queries.

Summary

In this chapter we tried to get to the bottom of how databases handle storage and

retrieval. What happens when you store data in a database, and what does the data‐

base do when you query for the data again later?

On a high level, we saw that storage engines fall into two broad categories: those opti‐

mized for transaction processing (OLTP), and those optimized for analytics (OLAP).

There are big differences between the access patterns in those use cases:

• OLTP systems are typically user-facing, which means that they may see a huge

volume of requests. In order to handle the load, applications usually only touch a

small number of records in each query. The application requests records using

some kind of key, and the storage engine uses an index to find the data for the

requested key. Disk seek time is often the bottleneck here.

• Data warehouses and similar analytic systems are less well known, because they

are primarily used by business analysts, not by end users. They handle a much

lower volume of queries than OLTP systems, but each query is typically very

demanding, requiring many millions of records to be scanned in a short time.

Disk bandwidth (not seek time) is often the bottleneck here, and column-

oriented storage is an increasingly popular solution for this kind of workload.

On the OLTP side, we saw storage engines from two main schools of thought:

• The log-structured school, which only permits appending to files and deleting

obsolete files, but never updates a file that has been written. Bitcask, SSTables,

LSM-trees, LevelDB, Cassandra, HBase, Lucene, and others belong to this group.

• The update-in-place school, which treats the disk as a set of fixed-size pages that

can be overwritten. B-trees are the biggest example of this philosophy, being used

in all major relational databases and also many nonrelational ones.

Log-structured storage engines are a comparatively recent development. Their key

idea is that they systematically turn random-access writes into sequential writes on

disk, which enables higher write throughput due to the performance characteristics

of hard drives and SSDs.

Summary | 103

Finishing off the OLTP side, we did a brief tour through some more complicated

indexing structures, and databases that are optimized for keeping all data in memory.

We then took a detour from the internals of storage engines to look at the high-level

architecture of a typical data warehouse. This background illustrated why analytic

workloads are so different from OLTP: when your queries require sequentially scan‐

ning across a large number of rows, indexes are much less relevant. Instead it

becomes important to encode data very compactly, to minimize the amount of data

that the query needs to read from disk. We discussed how column-oriented storage

helps achieve this goal.

As an application developer, if you’re armed with this knowledge about the internals

of storage engines, you are in a much better position to know which tool is best suited

for your particular application. If you need to adjust a database’s tuning parameters,

this understanding allows you to imagine what effect a higher or a lower value may

have.

Although this chapter couldn’t make you an expert in tuning any one particular stor‐

age engine, it has hopefully equipped you with enough vocabulary and ideas that you

can make sense of the documentation for the database of your choice.

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108 | Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval

CHAPTER 4

Encoding and Evolution

Everything changes and nothing stands still.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus, as quoted by Plato in Cratylus (360 BCE)

Applications inevitably change over time. Features are added or modified as new

products are launched, user requirements become better understood, or business cir‐

cumstances change. In Chapter 1 we introduced the idea of evolvability: we should aim to build systems that make it easy to adapt to change (see “Evolvability: Making

Change Easy” on page 21).

In most cases, a change to an application’s features also requires a change to data that

it stores: perhaps a new field or record type needs to be captured, or perhaps existing

data needs to be presented in a new way.

The data models we discussed in Chapter 2 have different ways of coping with such

change. Relational databases generally assume that all data in the database conforms

to one schema: although that schema can be changed (through schema migrations;

i.e., ALTER statements), there is exactly one schema in force at any one point in time.

By contrast, schema-on-read (“schemaless”) databases don’t enforce a schema, so the

database can contain a mixture of older and newer data formats written at different

times (see “Schema flexibility in the document model” on page 39).

When a data format or schema changes, a corresponding change to application code

often needs to happen (for example, you add a new field to a record, and the applica‐

tion code starts reading and writing that field). However, in a large application, code

changes often cannot happen instantaneously:

111

• With server-side applications you may want to perform a rolling upgrade (also

known as a staged rollout), deploying the new version to a few nodes at a time,

checking whether the new version is running smoothly, and gradually working

your way through all the nodes. This allows new versions to be deployed without

service downtime, and thus encourages more frequent releases and better evolva‐

bility.

• With client-side applications you’re at the mercy of the user, who may not install

the update for some time.

This means that old and new versions of the code, and old and new data formats,

may potentially all coexist in the system at the same time. In order for the system to

continue running smoothly, we need to maintain compatibility in both directions:

Backward compatibility

Newer code can read data that was written by older code.

Forward compatibility

Older code can read data that was written by newer code.

Backward compatibility is normally not hard to achieve: as author of the newer code,

you know the format of data written by older code, and so you can explicitly handle it

(if necessary by simply keeping the old code to read the old data). Forward compati‐

bility can be trickier, because it requires older code to ignore additions made by a

newer version of the code.

In this chapter we will look at several formats for encoding data, including JSON,

XML, Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and Avro. In particular, we will look at how they han‐

dle schema changes and how they support systems where old and new data and code

need to coexist. We will then discuss how those formats are used for data storage and

for communication: in web services, Representational State Transfer (REST), and

remote procedure calls (RPC), as well as message-passing systems such as actors and

message queues.

Formats for Encoding Data

Programs usually work with data in (at least) two different representations:

1. In memory, data is kept in objects, structs, lists, arrays, hash tables, trees, and so

on. These data structures are optimized for efficient access and manipulation by

the CPU (typically using pointers).

2. When you want to write data to a file or send it over the network, you have to

encode it as some kind of self-contained sequence of bytes (for example, a JSON

document). Since a pointer wouldn’t make sense to any other process, this

112 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

sequence-of-bytes representation looks quite different from the data structures

that are normally used in memory.i

Thus, we need some kind of translation between the two representations. The trans‐

lation from the in-memory representation to a byte sequence is called encoding (also

known as serialization or marshalling), and the reverse is called decoding ( parsing, deserialization, unmarshalling).ii Terminology clash

Serialization is unfortunately also used in the context of transac‐

tions (see Chapter 7), with a completely different meaning. To

avoid overloading the word we’ll stick with encoding in this book,

even though serialization is perhaps a more common term.

As this is such a common problem, there are a myriad different libraries and encod‐

ing formats to choose from. Let’s do a brief overview.

Language-Specific Formats

Many programming languages come with built-in support for encoding in-memory

objects into byte sequences. For example, Java has java.io.Serializable [1], Ruby

has Marshal [2], Python has pickle [3], and so on. Many third-party libraries also exist, such as Kryo for Java [4].

These encoding libraries are very convenient, because they allow in-memory objects

to be saved and restored with minimal additional code. However, they also have a

number of deep problems:

• The encoding is often tied to a particular programming language, and reading

the data in another language is very difficult. If you store or transmit data in such

an encoding, you are committing yourself to your current programming lan‐

guage for potentially a very long time, and precluding integrating your systems

with those of other organizations (which may use different languages).

• In order to restore data in the same object types, the decoding process needs to

be able to instantiate arbitrary classes. This is frequently a source of security

problems [5]: if an attacker can get your application to decode an arbitrary byte

sequence, they can instantiate arbitrary classes, which in turn often allows them

to do terrible things such as remotely executing arbitrary code [6, 7].

i. With the exception of some special cases, such as certain memory-mapped files or when operating directly

on compressed data (as described in “Column Compression” on page 97).

ii. Note that encoding has nothing to do with encryption. We don’t discuss encryption in this book.

Formats for Encoding Data | 113

• Versioning data is often an afterthought in these libraries: as they are intended

for quick and easy encoding of data, they often neglect the inconvenient prob‐

lems of forward and backward compatibility.

• Efficiency (CPU time taken to encode or decode, and the size of the encoded

structure) is also often an afterthought. For example, Java’s built-in serialization

is notorious for its bad performance and bloated encoding [8].

For these reasons it’s generally a bad idea to use your language’s built-in encoding for

anything other than very transient purposes.

JSON, XML, and Binary Variants

Moving to standardized encodings that can be written and read by many program‐

ming languages, JSON and XML are the obvious contenders. They are widely known,

widely supported, and almost as widely disliked. XML is often criticized for being too

verbose and unnecessarily complicated [9]. JSON’s popularity is mainly due to its

built-in support in web browsers (by virtue of being a subset of JavaScript) and sim‐

plicity relative to XML. CSV is another popular language-independent format, albeit

less powerful.

JSON, XML, and CSV are textual formats, and thus somewhat human-readable

(although the syntax is a popular topic of debate). Besides the superficial syntactic

issues, they also have some subtle problems:

• There is a lot of ambiguity around the encoding of numbers. In XML and CSV,

you cannot distinguish between a number and a string that happens to consist of

digits (except by referring to an external schema). JSON distinguishes strings and

numbers, but it doesn’t distinguish integers and floating-point numbers, and it

doesn’t specify a precision.

This is a problem when dealing with large numbers; for example, integers greater

than 253 cannot be exactly represented in an IEEE 754 double-precision floating-

point number, so such numbers become inaccurate when parsed in a language

that uses floating-point numbers (such as JavaScript). An example of numbers

larger than 253 occurs on Twitter, which uses a 64-bit number to identify each

tweet. The JSON returned by Twitter’s API includes tweet IDs twice, once as a

JSON number and once as a decimal string, to work around the fact that the

numbers are not correctly parsed by JavaScript applications [10].

• JSON and XML have good support for Unicode character strings (i.e., human-

readable text), but they don’t support binary strings (sequences of bytes without

a character encoding). Binary strings are a useful feature, so people get around

this limitation by encoding the binary data as text using Base64. The schema is

then used to indicate that the value should be interpreted as Base64-encoded.

This works, but it’s somewhat hacky and increases the data size by 33%.

114 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

• There is optional schema support for both XML [11] and JSON [12]. These

schema languages are quite powerful, and thus quite complicated to learn and

implement. Use of XML schemas is fairly widespread, but many JSON-based

tools don’t bother using schemas. Since the correct interpretation of data (such

as numbers and binary strings) depends on information in the schema, applica‐

tions that don’t use XML/JSON schemas need to potentially hardcode the appro‐

priate encoding/decoding logic instead.

• CSV does not have any schema, so it is up to the application to define the mean‐

ing of each row and column. If an application change adds a new row or column,

you have to handle that change manually. CSV is also a quite vague format (what

happens if a value contains a comma or a newline character?). Although its

escaping rules have been formally specified [13], not all parsers implement them

correctly.

Despite these flaws, JSON, XML, and CSV are good enough for many purposes. It’s

likely that they will remain popular, especially as data interchange formats (i.e., for

sending data from one organization to another). In these situations, as long as people

agree on what the format is, it often doesn’t matter how pretty or efficient the format

is. The difficulty of getting different organizations to agree on anything outweighs

most other concerns.

Binary encoding

For data that is used only internally within your organization, there is less pressure to

use a lowest-common-denominator encoding format. For example, you could choose

a format that is more compact or faster to parse. For a small dataset, the gains are

negligible, but once you get into the terabytes, the choice of data format can have a

big impact.

JSON is less verbose than XML, but both still use a lot of space compared to binary

formats. This observation led to the development of a profusion of binary encodings

for JSON (MessagePack, BSON, BJSON, UBJSON, BISON, and Smile, to name a few)

and for XML (WBXML and Fast Infoset, for example). These formats have been

adopted in various niches, but none of them are as widely adopted as the textual ver‐

sions of JSON and XML.

Some of these formats extend the set of datatypes (e.g., distinguishing integers and

floating-point numbers, or adding support for binary strings), but otherwise they

keep the JSON/XML data model unchanged. In particular, since they don’t prescribe

a schema, they need to include all the object field names within the encoded data.

That is, in a binary encoding of the JSON document in Example 4-1, they will need to

include the strings userName, favoriteNumber, and interests somewhere.

Formats for Encoding Data | 115

Example 4-1. Example record which we will encode in several binary formats in this

chapter

{

"userName": "Martin",

"favoriteNumber": 1337,

"interests": ["daydreaming", "hacking"]

}

Let’s look at an example of MessagePack, a binary encoding for JSON. Figure 4-1

shows the byte sequence that you get if you encode the JSON document in

Example 4-1 with MessagePack [14]. The first few bytes are as follows: 1. The first byte, 0x83, indicates that what follows is an object (top four bits = 0x80) with three fields (bottom four bits = 0x03). (In case you’re wondering what hap‐

pens if an object has more than 15 fields, so that the number of fields doesn’t fit

in four bits, it then gets a different type indicator, and the number of fields is

encoded in two or four bytes.)

2. The second byte, 0xa8, indicates that what follows is a string (top four bits =

0xa0) that is eight bytes long (bottom four bits = 0x08).

3. The next eight bytes are the field name userName in ASCII. Since the length was

indicated previously, there’s no need for any marker to tell us where the string

ends (or any escaping).

4. The next seven bytes encode the six-letter string value Martin with a prefix 0xa6,

and so on.

The binary encoding is 66 bytes long, which is only a little less than the 81 bytes taken

by the textual JSON encoding (with whitespace removed). All the binary encodings of

JSON are similar in this regard. It’s not clear whether such a small space reduction

(and perhaps a speedup in parsing) is worth the loss of human-readability.

In the following sections we will see how we can do much better, and encode the

same record in just 32 bytes.

116 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

Figure 4-1. Example record (Example 4-1 ) encoded using MessagePack.

Thrift and Protocol Buffers

Apache Thrift [15] and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) [16] are binary encoding libraries

that are based on the same principle. Protocol Buffers was originally developed at

Google, Thrift was originally developed at Facebook, and both were made open

source in 2007–08 [17].

Both Thrift and Protocol Buffers require a schema for any data that is encoded. To

encode the data in Example 4-1 in Thrift, you would describe the schema in the

Thrift interface definition language (IDL) like this:

struct Person {

1: required string userName,

2: optional i64 favoriteNumber,

3: optional list<string> interests

}

Formats for Encoding Data | 117

The equivalent schema definition for Protocol Buffers looks very similar:

message Person {

required string user_name = 1;

optional int64 favorite_number = 2;

repeated string interests = 3;

}

Thrift and Protocol Buffers each come with a code generation tool that takes a

schema definition like the ones shown here, and produces classes that implement the

schema in various programming languages [18]. Your application code can call this

generated code to encode or decode records of the schema.

What does data encoded with this schema look like? Confusingly, Thrift has two dif‐

ferent binary encoding formats,iii called BinaryProtocol and CompactProtocol, respec‐

tively. Let’s look at BinaryProtocol first. Encoding Example 4-1 in that format takes

59 bytes, as shown in Figure 4-2 [19].

Figure 4-2. Example record encoded using Thrift’s BinaryProtocol.

iii. Actually, it has three—BinaryProtocol, CompactProtocol, and DenseProtocol—although DenseProtocol

is only supported by the C++ implementation, so it doesn’t count as cross-language [18]. Besides those, it also has two different JSON-based encoding formats [19]. What fun!

118 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

Similarly to Figure 4-1, each field has a type annotation (to indicate whether it is a

string, integer, list, etc.) and, where required, a length indication (length of a string,

number of items in a list). The strings that appear in the data (“Martin”, “daydream‐

ing”, “hacking”) are also encoded as ASCII (or rather, UTF-8), similar to before.

The big difference compared to Figure 4-1 is that there are no field names (userName,

favoriteNumber, interests). Instead, the encoded data contains field tags, which are

numbers (1, 2, and 3). Those are the numbers that appear in the schema definition.

Field tags are like aliases for fields—they are a compact way of saying what field we’re

talking about, without having to spell out the field name.

The Thrift CompactProtocol encoding is semantically equivalent to BinaryProtocol,

but as you can see in Figure 4-3, it packs the same information into only 34 bytes. It

does this by packing the field type and tag number into a single byte, and by using

variable-length integers. Rather than using a full eight bytes for the number 1337, it is

encoded in two bytes, with the top bit of each byte used to indicate whether there are

still more bytes to come. This means numbers between –64 and 63 are encoded in

one byte, numbers between –8192 and 8191 are encoded in two bytes, etc. Bigger

numbers use more bytes.

Figure 4-3. Example record encoded using Thrift’s CompactProtocol.

Finally, Protocol Buffers (which has only one binary encoding format) encodes the

same data as shown in Figure 4-4. It does the bit packing slightly differently, but is

Formats for Encoding Data | 119

otherwise very similar to Thrift’s CompactProtocol. Protocol Buffers fits the same

record in 33 bytes.

Figure 4-4. Example record encoded using Protocol Buffers.

One detail to note: in the schemas shown earlier, each field was marked either

required or optional, but this makes no difference to how the field is encoded

(nothing in the binary data indicates whether a field was required). The difference is

simply that required enables a runtime check that fails if the field is not set, which

can be useful for catching bugs.

Field tags and schema evolution

We said previously that schemas inevitably need to change over time. We call this

schema evolution. How do Thrift and Protocol Buffers handle schema changes while

keeping backward and forward compatibility?

As you can see from the examples, an encoded record is just the concatenation of its

encoded fields. Each field is identified by its tag number (the numbers 1, 2, 3 in the

sample schemas) and annotated with a datatype (e.g., string or integer). If a field

value is not set, it is simply omitted from the encoded record. From this you can see

that field tags are critical to the meaning of the encoded data. You can change the

name of a field in the schema, since the encoded data never refers to field names, but

you cannot change a field’s tag, since that would make all existing encoded data

invalid.

120 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

You can add new fields to the schema, provided that you give each field a new tag

number. If old code (which doesn’t know about the new tag numbers you added)

tries to read data written by new code, including a new field with a tag number it

doesn’t recognize, it can simply ignore that field. The datatype annotation allows the

parser to determine how many bytes it needs to skip. This maintains forward com‐

patibility: old code can read records that were written by new code.

What about backward compatibility? As long as each field has a unique tag number,

new code can always read old data, because the tag numbers still have the same

meaning. The only detail is that if you add a new field, you cannot make it required.

If you were to add a field and make it required, that check would fail if new code read

data written by old code, because the old code will not have written the new field that

you added. Therefore, to maintain backward compatibility, every field you add after

the initial deployment of the schema must be optional or have a default value.

Removing a field is just like adding a field, with backward and forward compatibility

concerns reversed. That means you can only remove a field that is optional (a

required field can never be removed), and you can never use the same tag number

again (because you may still have data written somewhere that includes the old tag

number, and that field must be ignored by new code).

Datatypes and schema evolution

What about changing the datatype of a field? That may be possible—check the docu‐

mentation for details—but there is a risk that values will lose precision or get trunca‐

ted. For example, say you change a 32-bit integer into a 64-bit integer. New code can

easily read data written by old code, because the parser can fill in any missing bits

with zeros. However, if old code reads data written by new code, the old code is still

using a 32-bit variable to hold the value. If the decoded 64-bit value won’t fit in 32

bits, it will be truncated.

A curious detail of Protocol Buffers is that it does not have a list or array datatype,

but instead has a repeated marker for fields (which is a third option alongside

required and optional). As you can see in Figure 4-4, the encoding of a repeated

field is just what it says on the tin: the same field tag simply appears multiple times in

the record. This has the nice effect that it’s okay to change an optional (single-

valued) field into a repeated (multi-valued) field. New code reading old data sees a

list with zero or one elements (depending on whether the field was present); old code

reading new data sees only the last element of the list.

Thrift has a dedicated list datatype, which is parameterized with the datatype of the

list elements. This does not allow the same evolution from single-valued to multi-

valued as Protocol Buffers does, but it has the advantage of supporting nested lists.

Formats for Encoding Data | 121

Avro

Apache Avro [20] is another binary encoding format that is interestingly different

from Protocol Buffers and Thrift. It was started in 2009 as a subproject of Hadoop, as

a result of Thrift not being a good fit for Hadoop’s use cases [21].

Avro also uses a schema to specify the structure of the data being encoded. It has two

schema languages: one (Avro IDL) intended for human editing, and one (based on

JSON) that is more easily machine-readable.

Our example schema, written in Avro IDL, might look like this:

record Person {

string userName;

union { null, long } favoriteNumber = null;

array<string> interests;

}

The equivalent JSON representation of that schema is as follows:

{

"type": "record",

"name": "Person",

"fields": [

{"name": "userName", "type": "string"},

{"name": "favoriteNumber", "type": ["null", "long"], "default": null}, {"name": "interests", "type": {"type": "array", "items": "string"}}

]

}

First of all, notice that there are no tag numbers in the schema. If we encode our

example record (Example 4-1) using this schema, the Avro binary encoding is just 32

bytes long—the most compact of all the encodings we have seen. The breakdown of

the encoded byte sequence is shown in Figure 4-5.

If you examine the byte sequence, you can see that there is nothing to identify fields

or their datatypes. The encoding simply consists of values concatenated together. A

string is just a length prefix followed by UTF-8 bytes, but there’s nothing in the enco‐

ded data that tells you that it is a string. It could just as well be an integer, or some‐

thing else entirely. An integer is encoded using a variable-length encoding (the same

as Thrift’s CompactProtocol).

122 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

Figure 4-5. Example record encoded using Avro.

To parse the binary data, you go through the fields in the order that they appear in

the schema and use the schema to tell you the datatype of each field. This means that

the binary data can only be decoded correctly if the code reading the data is using the

exact same schema as the code that wrote the data. Any mismatch in the schema

between the reader and the writer would mean incorrectly decoded data.

So, how does Avro support schema evolution?

The writer’s schema and the reader’s schema

With Avro, when an application wants to encode some data (to write it to a file or

database, to send it over the network, etc.), it encodes the data using whatever version

of the schema it knows about—for example, that schema may be compiled into the

application. This is known as the writer’s schema.

When an application wants to decode some data (read it from a file or database,

receive it from the network, etc.), it is expecting the data to be in some schema, which

is known as the reader’s schema. That is the schema the application code is relying on

—code may have been generated from that schema during the application’s build

process.

The key idea with Avro is that the writer’s schema and the reader’s schema don’t have

to be the same—they only need to be compatible. When data is decoded (read), the

Formats for Encoding Data | 123

Avro library resolves the differences by looking at the writer’s schema and the

reader’s schema side by side and translating the data from the writer’s schema into

the reader’s schema. The Avro specification [20] defines exactly how this resolution

works, and it is illustrated in Figure 4-6.

For example, it’s no problem if the writer’s schema and the reader’s schema have

their fields in a different order, because the schema resolution matches up the fields

by field name. If the code reading the data encounters a field that appears in the

writer’s schema but not in the reader’s schema, it is ignored. If the code reading the

data expects some field, but the writer’s schema does not contain a field of that name,

it is filled in with a default value declared in the reader’s schema.

Figure 4-6. An Avro reader resolves differences between the writer’s schema and the

reader’s schema.

Schema evolution rules

With Avro, forward compatibility means that you can have a new version of the

schema as writer and an old version of the schema as reader. Conversely, backward

compatibility means that you can have a new version of the schema as reader and an

old version as writer.

To maintain compatibility, you may only add or remove a field that has a default

value. (The field favoriteNumber in our Avro schema has a default value of null.)

For example, say you add a field with a default value, so this new field exists in the

new schema but not the old one. When a reader using the new schema reads a record

written with the old schema, the default value is filled in for the missing field.

If you were to add a field that has no default value, new readers wouldn’t be able to

read data written by old writers, so you would break backward compatibility. If you

were to remove a field that has no default value, old readers wouldn’t be able to read

data written by new writers, so you would break forward compatibility.

124 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

In some programming languages, null is an acceptable default for any variable, but

this is not the case in Avro: if you want to allow a field to be null, you have to use a

union type. For example, union { null, long, string } field; indicates that

field can be a number, or a string, or null. You can only use null as a default value if

it is one of the branches of the union.iv This is a little more verbose than having every‐

thing nullable by default, but it helps prevent bugs by being explicit about what can

and cannot be null [22].

Consequently, Avro doesn’t have optional and required markers in the same way as

Protocol Buffers and Thrift do (it has union types and default values instead).

Changing the datatype of a field is possible, provided that Avro can convert the type.

Changing the name of a field is possible but a little tricky: the reader’s schema can

contain aliases for field names, so it can match an old writer’s schema field names

against the aliases. This means that changing a field name is backward compatible but

not forward compatible. Similarly, adding a branch to a union type is backward com‐

patible but not forward compatible.

But what is the writer’s schema?

There is an important question that we’ve glossed over so far: how does the reader

know the writer’s schema with which a particular piece of data was encoded? We

can’t just include the entire schema with every record, because the schema would

likely be much bigger than the encoded data, making all the space savings from the

binary encoding futile.

The answer depends on the context in which Avro is being used. To give a few exam‐

ples:

Large file with lots of records

A common use for Avro—especially in the context of Hadoop—is for storing a

large file containing millions of records, all encoded with the same schema. (We

will discuss this kind of situation in Chapter 10.) In this case, the writer of that

file can just include the writer’s schema once at the beginning of the file. Avro

specifies a file format (object container files) to do this.

Database with individually written records

In a database, different records may be written at different points in time using

different writer’s schemas—you cannot assume that all the records will have the

same schema. The simplest solution is to include a version number at the begin‐

ning of every encoded record, and to keep a list of schema versions in your data‐

iv. To be precise, the default value must be of the type of the first branch of the union, although this is a specific limitation of Avro, not a general feature of union types.

Formats for Encoding Data | 125

base. A reader can fetch a record, extract the version number, and then fetch the

writer’s schema for that version number from the database. Using that writer’s

schema, it can decode the rest of the record. (Espresso [23] works this way, for

example.)

Sending records over a network connection

When two processes are communicating over a bidirectional network connec‐

tion, they can negotiate the schema version on connection setup and then use

that schema for the lifetime of the connection. The Avro RPC protocol (see

“Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC” on page 131) works like this.

A database of schema versions is a useful thing to have in any case, since it acts as

documentation and gives you a chance to check schema compatibility [24]. As the

version number, you could use a simple incrementing integer, or you could use a

hash of the schema.

Dynamically generated schemas

One advantage of Avro’s approach, compared to Protocol Buffers and Thrift, is that

the schema doesn’t contain any tag numbers. But why is this important? What’s the

problem with keeping a couple of numbers in the schema?

The difference is that Avro is friendlier to dynamically generated schemas. For exam‐

ple, say you have a relational database whose contents you want to dump to a file, and

you want to use a binary format to avoid the aforementioned problems with textual

formats (JSON, CSV, SQL). If you use Avro, you can fairly easily generate an Avro

schema (in the JSON representation we saw earlier) from the relational schema and

encode the database contents using that schema, dumping it all to an Avro object

container file [25]. You generate a record schema for each database table, and each

column becomes a field in that record. The column name in the database maps to the

field name in Avro.

Now, if the database schema changes (for example, a table has one column added and

one column removed), you can just generate a new Avro schema from the updated

database schema and export data in the new Avro schema. The data export process

does not need to pay any attention to the schema change—it can simply do the

schema conversion every time it runs. Anyone who reads the new data files will see

that the fields of the record have changed, but since the fields are identified by name,

the updated writer’s schema can still be matched up with the old reader’s schema.

By contrast, if you were using Thrift or Protocol Buffers for this purpose, the field

tags would likely have to be assigned by hand: every time the database schema

changes, an administrator would have to manually update the mapping from data‐

base column names to field tags. (It might be possible to automate this, but the

schema generator would have to be very careful to not assign previously used field

126 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

tags.) This kind of dynamically generated schema simply wasn’t a design goal of

Thrift or Protocol Buffers, whereas it was for Avro.

Code generation and dynamically typed languages

Thrift and Protocol Buffers rely on code generation: after a schema has been defined,

you can generate code that implements this schema in a programming language of

your choice. This is useful in statically typed languages such as Java, C++, or C#,

because it allows efficient in-memory structures to be used for decoded data, and it

allows type checking and autocompletion in IDEs when writing programs that access

the data structures.

In dynamically typed programming languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, or Python,

there is not much point in generating code, since there is no compile-time type

checker to satisfy. Code generation is often frowned upon in these languages, since

they otherwise avoid an explicit compilation step. Moreover, in the case of a dynami‐

cally generated schema (such as an Avro schema generated from a database table),

code generation is an unnecessarily obstacle to getting to the data.

Avro provides optional code generation for statically typed programming languages,

but it can be used just as well without any code generation. If you have an object con‐

tainer file (which embeds the writer’s schema), you can simply open it using the Avro

library and look at the data in the same way as you could look at a JSON file. The file

is self-describing since it includes all the necessary metadata.

This property is especially useful in conjunction with dynamically typed data pro‐

cessing languages like Apache Pig [26]. In Pig, you can just open some Avro files,

start analyzing them, and write derived datasets to output files in Avro format

without even thinking about schemas.

The Merits of Schemas

As we saw, Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and Avro all use a schema to describe a binary

encoding format. Their schema languages are much simpler than XML Schema or

JSON Schema, which support much more detailed validation rules (e.g., “the string

value of this field must match this regular expression” or “the integer value of this

field must be between 0 and 100”). As Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and Avro are simpler

to implement and simpler to use, they have grown to support a fairly wide range of

programming languages.

The ideas on which these encodings are based are by no means new. For example,

they have a lot in common with ASN.1, a schema definition language that was first

standardized in 1984 [27]. It was used to define various network protocols, and its

binary encoding (DER) is still used to encode SSL certificates (X.509), for example

[28]. ASN.1 supports schema evolution using tag numbers, similar to Protocol Buf‐

Formats for Encoding Data | 127

fers and Thrift [29]. However, it’s also very complex and badly documented, so ASN.1 is probably not a good choice for new applications.

Many data systems also implement some kind of proprietary binary encoding for

their data. For example, most relational databases have a network protocol over

which you can send queries to the database and get back responses. Those protocols

are generally specific to a particular database, and the database vendor provides a

driver (e.g., using the ODBC or JDBC APIs) that decodes responses from the data‐

base’s network protocol into in-memory data structures.

So, we can see that although textual data formats such as JSON, XML, and CSV are

widespread, binary encodings based on schemas are also a viable option. They have a

number of nice properties:

• They can be much more compact than the various “binary JSON” variants, since

they can omit field names from the encoded data.

• The schema is a valuable form of documentation, and because the schema is

required for decoding, you can be sure that it is up to date (whereas manually

maintained documentation may easily diverge from reality).

• Keeping a database of schemas allows you to check forward and backward com‐

patibility of schema changes, before anything is deployed.

• For users of statically typed programming languages, the ability to generate code

from the schema is useful, since it enables type checking at compile time.

In summary, schema evolution allows the same kind of flexibility as schemaless/

schema-on-read JSON databases provide (see “Schema flexibility in the document

model” on page 39), while also providing better guarantees about your data and bet‐

ter tooling.

Modes of Dataflow

At the beginning of this chapter we said that whenever you want to send some data to

another process with which you don’t share memory—for example, whenever you

want to send data over the network or write it to a file—you need to encode it as a

sequence of bytes. We then discussed a variety of different encodings for doing this.

We talked about forward and backward compatibility, which are important for evolv‐

ability (making change easy by allowing you to upgrade different parts of your system

independently, and not having to change everything at once). Compatibility is a rela‐

tionship between one process that encodes the data, and another process that decodes

it.

128 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

That’s a fairly abstract idea—there are many ways data can flow from one process to

another. Who encodes the data, and who decodes it? In the rest of this chapter we

will explore some of the most common ways how data flows between processes:

• Via databases (see “Dataflow Through Databases” on page 129)

• Via service calls (see “Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC” on page 131)

• Via asynchronous message passing (see “Message-Passing Dataflow” on page 136)

Dataflow Through Databases

In a database, the process that writes to the database encodes the data, and the pro‐

cess that reads from the database decodes it. There may just be a single process

accessing the database, in which case the reader is simply a later version of the same

process—in that case you can think of storing something in the database as sending a

message to your future self.

Backward compatibility is clearly necessary here; otherwise your future self won’t be

able to decode what you previously wrote.

In general, it’s common for several different processes to be accessing a database at

the same time. Those processes might be several different applications or services, or

they may simply be several instances of the same service (running in parallel for scal‐

ability or fault tolerance). Either way, in an environment where the application is

changing, it is likely that some processes accessing the database will be running newer

code and some will be running older code—for example because a new version is cur‐

rently being deployed in a rolling upgrade, so some instances have been updated

while others haven’t yet.

This means that a value in the database may be written by a newer version of the

code, and subsequently read by an older version of the code that is still running.

Thus, forward compatibility is also often required for databases.

However, there is an additional snag. Say you add a field to a record schema, and the

newer code writes a value for that new field to the database. Subsequently, an older

version of the code (which doesn’t yet know about the new field) reads the record,

updates it, and writes it back. In this situation, the desirable behavior is usually for

the old code to keep the new field intact, even though it couldn’t be interpreted.

The encoding formats discussed previously support such preservation of unknown

fields, but sometimes you need to take care at an application level, as illustrated in

Figure 4-7. For example, if you decode a database value into model objects in the

application, and later reencode those model objects, the unknown field might be lost

in that translation process. Solving this is not a hard problem; you just need to be

aware of it.

Modes of Dataflow | 129

Figure 4-7. When an older version of the application updates data previously written

by a newer version of the application, data may be lost if you’re not careful.

Different values written at different times

A database generally allows any value to be updated at any time. This means that

within a single database you may have some values that were written five milli‐

seconds ago, and some values that were written five years ago.

When you deploy a new version of your application (of a server-side application, at

least), you may entirely replace the old version with the new version within a few

minutes. The same is not true of database contents: the five-year-old data will still be

there, in the original encoding, unless you have explicitly rewritten it since then. This

observation is sometimes summed up as data outlives code.

Rewriting ( migrating) data into a new schema is certainly possible, but it’s an expen‐

sive thing to do on a large dataset, so most databases avoid it if possible. Most rela‐

tional databases allow simple schema changes, such as adding a new column with a

null default value, without rewriting existing data.v When an old row is read, the

database fills in nulls for any columns that are missing from the encoded data on

disk. LinkedIn’s document database Espresso uses Avro for storage, allowing it to use

Avro’s schema evolution rules [23].

v. Except for MySQL, which often rewrites an entire table even though it is not strictly necessary, as men‐

tioned in “Schema flexibility in the document model” on page 39.

130 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

Schema evolution thus allows the entire database to appear as if it was encoded with a

single schema, even though the underlying storage may contain records encoded with

various historical versions of the schema.

Archival storage

Perhaps you take a snapshot of your database from time to time, say for backup pur‐

poses or for loading into a data warehouse (see “Data Warehousing” on page 91). In

this case, the data dump will typically be encoded using the latest schema, even if the

original encoding in the source database contained a mixture of schema versions

from different eras. Since you’re copying the data anyway, you might as well encode

the copy of the data consistently.

As the data dump is written in one go and is thereafter immutable, formats like Avro

object container files are a good fit. This is also a good opportunity to encode the data

in an analytics-friendly column-oriented format such as Parquet (see “Column Com‐

pression” on page 97).

In Chapter 10 we will talk more about using data in archival storage.

Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC

When you have processes that need to communicate over a network, there are a few

different ways of arranging that communication. The most common arrangement is

to have two roles: clients and servers. The servers expose an API over the network,

and the clients can connect to the servers to make requests to that API. The API

exposed by the server is known as a service.

The web works this way: clients (web browsers) make requests to web servers, mak‐

ing GET requests to download HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc., and making POST

requests to submit data to the server. The API consists of a standardized set of proto‐

cols and data formats (HTTP, URLs, SSL/TLS, HTML, etc.). Because web browsers,

web servers, and website authors mostly agree on these standards, you can use any

web browser to access any website (at least in theory!).

Web browsers are not the only type of client. For example, a native app running on a

mobile device or a desktop computer can also make network requests to a server, and

a client-side JavaScript application running inside a web browser can use

XMLHttpRequest to become an HTTP client (this technique is known as Ajax [30]).

In this case, the server’s response is typically not HTML for displaying to a human,

but rather data in an encoding that is convenient for further processing by the client-

side application code (such as JSON). Although HTTP may be used as the transport

protocol, the API implemented on top is application-specific, and the client and

server need to agree on the details of that API.

Modes of Dataflow | 131

Moreover, a server can itself be a client to another service (for example, a typical web

app server acts as client to a database). This approach is often used to decompose a

large application into smaller services by area of functionality, such that one service

makes a request to another when it requires some functionality or data from that

other service. This way of building applications has traditionally been called a service-

oriented architecture (SOA), more recently refined and rebranded as microservices

architecture [31, 32].

In some ways, services are similar to databases: they typically allow clients to submit

and query data. However, while databases allow arbitrary queries using the query lan‐

guages we discussed in Chapter 2, services expose an application-specific API that

only allows inputs and outputs that are predetermined by the business logic (applica‐

tion code) of the service [33]. This restriction provides a degree of encapsulation:

services can impose fine-grained restrictions on what clients can and cannot do.

A key design goal of a service-oriented/microservices architecture is to make the

application easier to change and maintain by making services independently deploya‐

ble and evolvable. For example, each service should be owned by one team, and that

team should be able to release new versions of the service frequently, without having

to coordinate with other teams. In other words, we should expect old and new ver‐

sions of servers and clients to be running at the same time, and so the data encoding

used by servers and clients must be compatible across versions of the service API—

precisely what we’ve been talking about in this chapter.

Web services

When HTTP is used as the underlying protocol for talking to the service, it is called a

web service. This is perhaps a slight misnomer, because web services are not only used

on the web, but in several different contexts. For example:

1. A client application running on a user’s device (e.g., a native app on a mobile

device, or JavaScript web app using Ajax) making requests to a service over

HTTP. These requests typically go over the public internet.

2. One service making requests to another service owned by the same organization,

often located within the same datacenter, as part of a service-oriented/microser‐

vices architecture. (Software that supports this kind of use case is sometimes

called middleware.)

3. One service making requests to a service owned by a different organization, usu‐

ally via the internet. This is used for data exchange between different organiza‐

tions’ backend systems. This category includes public APIs provided by online

services, such as credit card processing systems, or OAuth for shared access to

user data.

132 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

There are two popular approaches to web services: REST and SOAP. They are almost diametrically opposed in terms of philosophy, and often the subject of heated debate among their respective proponents.vi

REST is not a protocol, but rather a design philosophy that builds upon the principles

of HTTP [34, 35]. It emphasizes simple data formats, using URLs for identifying

resources and using HTTP features for cache control, authentication, and content

type negotiation. REST has been gaining popularity compared to SOAP, at least in

the context of cross-organizational service integration [36], and is often associated

with microservices [31]. An API designed according to the principles of REST is

called RESTful.

By contrast, SOAP is an XML-based protocol for making network API requests.vii

Although it is most commonly used over HTTP, it aims to be independent from

HTTP and avoids using most HTTP features. Instead, it comes with a sprawling and

complex multitude of related standards (the web service framework, known as WS-*)

that add various features [37].

The API of a SOAP web service is described using an XML-based language called the

Web Services Description Language, or WSDL. WSDL enables code generation so

that a client can access a remote service using local classes and method calls (which

are encoded to XML messages and decoded again by the framework). This is useful in

statically typed programming languages, but less so in dynamically typed ones (see

“Code generation and dynamically typed languages” on page 127).

As WSDL is not designed to be human-readable, and as SOAP messages are often too

complex to construct manually, users of SOAP rely heavily on tool support, code

generation, and IDEs [38]. For users of programming languages that are not sup‐

ported by SOAP vendors, integration with SOAP services is difficult.

Even though SOAP and its various extensions are ostensibly standardized, interoper‐

ability between different vendors’ implementations often causes problems [39]. For

all of these reasons, although SOAP is still used in many large enterprises, it has fallen

out of favor in most smaller companies.

RESTful APIs tend to favor simpler approaches, typically involving less code genera‐

tion and automated tooling. A definition format such as OpenAPI, also known as

Swagger [40], can be used to describe RESTful APIs and produce documentation.

vi. Even within each camp there are plenty of arguments. For example, HATEOAS ( hypermedia as the engine of application state), often provokes discussions [35].

vii. Despite the similarity of acronyms, SOAP is not a requirement for SOA. SOAP is a particular technology, whereas SOA is a general approach to building systems.

Modes of Dataflow | 133

The problems with remote procedure calls (RPCs)

Web services are merely the latest incarnation of a long line of technologies for mak‐

ing API requests over a network, many of which received a lot of hype but have seri‐

ous problems. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Java’s Remote Method Invocation

(RMI) are limited to Java. The Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is

limited to Microsoft platforms. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture

(CORBA) is excessively complex, and does not provide backward or forward compat‐

ibility [41].

All of these are based on the idea of a remote procedure call (RPC), which has been

around since the 1970s [42]. The RPC model tries to make a request to a remote net‐

work service look the same as calling a function or method in your programming lan‐

guage, within the same process (this abstraction is called location transparency).

Although RPC seems convenient at first, the approach is fundamentally flawed [43,

44]. A network request is very different from a local function call:

• A local function call is predictable and either succeeds or fails, depending only on

parameters that are under your control. A network request is unpredictable: the

request or response may be lost due to a network problem, or the remote

machine may be slow or unavailable, and such problems are entirely outside of

your control. Network problems are common, so you have to anticipate them,

for example by retrying a failed request.

• A local function call either returns a result, or throws an exception, or never

returns (because it goes into an infinite loop or the process crashes). A network

request has another possible outcome: it may return without a result, due to a

timeout. In that case, you simply don’t know what happened: if you don’t get a

response from the remote service, you have no way of knowing whether the

request got through or not. (We discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 8.)

• If you retry a failed network request, it could happen that the requests are

actually getting through, and only the responses are getting lost. In that case,

retrying will cause the action to be performed multiple times, unless you build a

mechanism for deduplication ( idempotence) into the protocol. Local function

calls don’t have this problem. (We discuss idempotence in more detail in Chap‐

ter 11.)

• Every time you call a local function, it normally takes about the same time to exe‐

cute. A network request is much slower than a function call, and its latency is

also wildly variable: at good times it may complete in less than a millisecond, but

when the network is congested or the remote service is overloaded it may take

many seconds to do exactly the same thing.

• When you call a local function, you can efficiently pass it references (pointers) to

objects in local memory. When you make a network request, all those parameters

134 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

need to be encoded into a sequence of bytes that can be sent over the network.

That’s okay if the parameters are primitives like numbers or strings, but quickly

becomes problematic with larger objects.

• The client and the service may be implemented in different programming lan‐

guages, so the RPC framework must translate datatypes from one language into

another. This can end up ugly, since not all languages have the same types—

recall JavaScript’s problems with numbers greater than 253, for example (see

“JSON, XML, and Binary Variants” on page 114). This problem doesn’t exist in a

single process written in a single language.

All of these factors mean that there’s no point trying to make a remote service look

too much like a local object in your programming language, because it’s a fundamen‐

tally different thing. Part of the appeal of REST is that it doesn’t try to hide the fact

that it’s a network protocol (although this doesn’t seem to stop people from building

RPC libraries on top of REST).

Current directions for RPC

Despite all these problems, RPC isn’t going away. Various RPC frameworks have

been built on top of all the encodings mentioned in this chapter: for example, Thrift

and Avro come with RPC support included, gRPC is an RPC implementation using

Protocol Buffers, Finagle also uses Thrift, and Rest.li uses JSON over HTTP.

This new generation of RPC frameworks is more explicit about the fact that a remote

request is different from a local function call. For example, Finagle and Rest.li use

futures ( promises) to encapsulate asynchronous actions that may fail. Futures also

simplify situations where you need to make requests to multiple services in parallel,

and combine their results [45]. gRPC supports streams, where a call consists of not just one request and one response, but a series of requests and responses over time [46].

Some of these frameworks also provide service discovery—that is, allowing a client to

find out at which IP address and port number it can find a particular service. We will

return to this topic in “Request Routing” on page 214.

Custom RPC protocols with a binary encoding format can achieve better perfor‐

mance than something generic like JSON over REST. However, a RESTful API has

other significant advantages: it is good for experimentation and debugging (you can

simply make requests to it using a web browser or the command-line tool curl,

without any code generation or software installation), it is supported by all main‐

stream programming languages and platforms, and there is a vast ecosystem of tools

available (servers, caches, load balancers, proxies, firewalls, monitoring, debugging

tools, testing tools, etc.).

Modes of Dataflow | 135

For these reasons, REST seems to be the predominant style for public APIs. The main

focus of RPC frameworks is on requests between services owned by the same organi‐

zation, typically within the same datacenter.

Data encoding and evolution for RPC

For evolvability, it is important that RPC clients and servers can be changed and

deployed independently. Compared to data flowing through databases (as described

in the last section), we can make a simplifying assumption in the case of dataflow

through services: it is reasonable to assume that all the servers will be updated first,

and all the clients second. Thus, you only need backward compatibility on requests,

and forward compatibility on responses.

The backward and forward compatibility properties of an RPC scheme are inherited

from whatever encoding it uses:

• Thrift, gRPC (Protocol Buffers), and Avro RPC can be evolved according to the

compatibility rules of the respective encoding format.

• In SOAP, requests and responses are specified with XML schemas. These can be

evolved, but there are some subtle pitfalls [47].

• RESTful APIs most commonly use JSON (without a formally specified schema)

for responses, and JSON or URI-encoded/form-encoded request parameters for

requests. Adding optional request parameters and adding new fields to response

objects are usually considered changes that maintain compatibility.

Service compatibility is made harder by the fact that RPC is often used for communi‐

cation across organizational boundaries, so the provider of a service often has no

control over its clients and cannot force them to upgrade. Thus, compatibility needs

to be maintained for a long time, perhaps indefinitely. If a compatibility-breaking

change is required, the service provider often ends up maintaining multiple versions

of the service API side by side.

There is no agreement on how API versioning should work (i.e., how a client can

indicate which version of the API it wants to use [48]). For RESTful APIs, common

approaches are to use a version number in the URL or in the HTTP Accept header.

For services that use API keys to identify a particular client, another option is to store

a client’s requested API version on the server and to allow this version selection to be

updated through a separate administrative interface [49].

Message-Passing Dataflow

We have been looking at the different ways encoded data flows from one process to

another. So far, we’ve discussed REST and RPC (where one process sends a request

over the network to another process and expects a response as quickly as possible),

136 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

and databases (where one process writes encoded data, and another process reads it

again sometime in the future).

In this final section, we will briefly look at asynchronous message-passing systems,

which are somewhere between RPC and databases. They are similar to RPC in that a

client’s request (usually called a message) is delivered to another process with low

latency. They are similar to databases in that the message is not sent via a direct net‐

work connection, but goes via an intermediary called a message broker (also called a

message queue or message-oriented middleware), which stores the message temporar‐

ily.

Using a message broker has several advantages compared to direct RPC:

• It can act as a buffer if the recipient is unavailable or overloaded, and thus

improve system reliability.

• It can automatically redeliver messages to a process that has crashed, and thus

prevent messages from being lost.

• It avoids the sender needing to know the IP address and port number of the

recipient (which is particularly useful in a cloud deployment where virtual

machines often come and go).

• It allows one message to be sent to several recipients.

• It logically decouples the sender from the recipient (the sender just publishes

messages and doesn’t care who consumes them).

However, a difference compared to RPC is that message-passing communication is

usually one-way: a sender normally doesn’t expect to receive a reply to its messages. It

is possible for a process to send a response, but this would usually be done on a sepa‐

rate channel. This communication pattern is asynchronous: the sender doesn’t wait

for the message to be delivered, but simply sends it and then forgets about it.

Message brokers

In the past, the landscape of message brokers was dominated by commercial enter‐

prise software from companies such as TIBCO, IBM WebSphere, and webMethods.

More recently, open source implementations such as RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Hor‐

netQ, NATS, and Apache Kafka have become popular. We will compare them in

more detail in Chapter 11.

The detailed delivery semantics vary by implementation and configuration, but in

general, message brokers are used as follows: one process sends a message to a named

queue or topic, and the broker ensures that the message is delivered to one or more

consumers of or subscribers to that queue or topic. There can be many producers and

many consumers on the same topic.

Modes of Dataflow | 137

A topic provides only one-way dataflow. However, a consumer may itself publish

messages to another topic (so you can chain them together, as we shall see in Chap‐

ter 11), or to a reply queue that is consumed by the sender of the original message

(allowing a request/response dataflow, similar to RPC).

Message brokers typically don’t enforce any particular data model—a message is just

a sequence of bytes with some metadata, so you can use any encoding format. If the

encoding is backward and forward compatible, you have the greatest flexibility to

change publishers and consumers independently and deploy them in any order.

If a consumer republishes messages to another topic, you may need to be careful to

preserve unknown fields, to prevent the issue described previously in the context of

databases (Figure 4-7).

Distributed actor frameworks

The actor model is a programming model for concurrency in a single process. Rather

than dealing directly with threads (and the associated problems of race conditions,

locking, and deadlock), logic is encapsulated in actors. Each actor typically represents

one client or entity, it may have some local state (which is not shared with any other

actor), and it communicates with other actors by sending and receiving asynchro‐

nous messages. Message delivery is not guaranteed: in certain error scenarios, mes‐

sages will be lost. Since each actor processes only one message at a time, it doesn’t

need to worry about threads, and each actor can be scheduled independently by the

framework.

In distributed actor frameworks, this programming model is used to scale an applica‐

tion across multiple nodes. The same message-passing mechanism is used, no matter

whether the sender and recipient are on the same node or different nodes. If they are

on different nodes, the message is transparently encoded into a byte sequence, sent

over the network, and decoded on the other side.

Location transparency works better in the actor model than in RPC, because the actor

model already assumes that messages may be lost, even within a single process.

Although latency over the network is likely higher than within the same process,

there is less of a fundamental mismatch between local and remote communication

when using the actor model.

A distributed actor framework essentially integrates a message broker and the actor

programming model into a single framework. However, if you want to perform roll‐

ing upgrades of your actor-based application, you still have to worry about forward

and backward compatibility, as messages may be sent from a node running the new

version to a node running the old version, and vice versa.

Three popular distributed actor frameworks handle message encoding as follows:

138 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

• Akka uses Java’s built-in serialization by default, which does not provide forward or backward compatibility. However, you can replace it with something like Protocol Buffers, and thus gain the ability to do rolling upgrades [50].

• Orleans by default uses a custom data encoding format that does not support

rolling upgrade deployments; to deploy a new version of your application, you

need to set up a new cluster, move traffic from the old cluster to the new one, and

shut down the old one [51, 52]. Like with Akka, custom serialization plug-ins can

be used.

• In Erlang OTP it is surprisingly hard to make changes to record schemas (despite

the system having many features designed for high availability); rolling upgrades

are possible but need to be planned carefully [53]. An experimental new maps

datatype (a JSON-like structure, introduced in Erlang R17 in 2014) may make

this easier in the future [54].

Summary

In this chapter we looked at several ways of turning data structures into bytes on the

network or bytes on disk. We saw how the details of these encodings affect not only

their efficiency, but more importantly also the architecture of applications and your

options for deploying them.

In particular, many services need to support rolling upgrades, where a new version of

a service is gradually deployed to a few nodes at a time, rather than deploying to all

nodes simultaneously. Rolling upgrades allow new versions of a service to be released

without downtime (thus encouraging frequent small releases over rare big releases)

and make deployments less risky (allowing faulty releases to be detected and rolled

back before they affect a large number of users). These properties are hugely benefi‐

cial for evolvability, the ease of making changes to an application.

During rolling upgrades, or for various other reasons, we must assume that different

nodes are running the different versions of our application’s code. Thus, it is impor‐

tant that all data flowing around the system is encoded in a way that provides back‐

ward compatibility (new code can read old data) and forward compatibility (old code

can read new data).

We discussed several data encoding formats and their compatibility properties:

• Programming language–specific encodings are restricted to a single program‐

ming language and often fail to provide forward and backward compatibility.

• Textual formats like JSON, XML, and CSV are widespread, and their compatibil‐

ity depends on how you use them. They have optional schema languages, which

are sometimes helpful and sometimes a hindrance. These formats are somewhat

Summary | 139

vague about datatypes, so you have to be careful with things like numbers and

binary strings.

• Binary schema–driven formats like Thrift, Protocol Buffers, and Avro allow

compact, efficient encoding with clearly defined forward and backward compati‐

bility semantics. The schemas can be useful for documentation and code genera‐

tion in statically typed languages. However, they have the downside that data

needs to be decoded before it is human-readable.

We also discussed several modes of dataflow, illustrating different scenarios in which

data encodings are important:

• Databases, where the process writing to the database encodes the data and the

process reading from the database decodes it

• RPC and REST APIs, where the client encodes a request, the server decodes the

request and encodes a response, and the client finally decodes the response

• Asynchronous message passing (using message brokers or actors), where nodes

communicate by sending each other messages that are encoded by the sender

and decoded by the recipient

We can conclude that with a bit of care, backward/forward compatibility and rolling

upgrades are quite achievable. May your application’s evolution be rapid and your

deployments be frequent.

References

[1] “Java Object Serialization Specification,” docs.oracle.com, 2010.

[2] “Ruby 2.2.0 API Documentation,” ruby-doc.org, Dec 2014.

[3] “The Python 3.4.3 Standard Library Reference Manual,” docs.python.org, February 2015.

[4] “EsotericSoftware/kryo,” github.com, October 2014.

[5] “CWE-502: Deserialization of Untrusted Data,” Common Weakness Enumera‐

tion, cwe.mitre.org, July 30, 2014.

[6] Steve Breen: “What Do WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, OpenNMS, and

Your Application Have in Common? This Vulnerability,” foxglovesecurity.com, November 6, 2015.

[7] Patrick McKenzie: “What the Rails Security Issue Means for Your Startup,” kalzumeus.com, January 31, 2013.

[8] Eishay Smith: “jvm-serializers wiki,” github.com, November 2014.

140 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

[9] “XML Is a Poor Copy of S-Expressions,” c2.com wiki.

[10] Matt Harris: “Snowflake: An Update and Some Very Important Information,”

email to Twitter Development Talk mailing list, October 19, 2010.

[11] Shudi (Sandy) Gao, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, and Henry S. Thompson: “XML

Schema 1.1,” W3C Recommendation, May 2001.

[12] Francis Galiegue, Kris Zyp, and Gary Court: “JSON Schema,” IETF Internet-

Draft, February 2013.

[13] Yakov Shafranovich: “RFC 4180: Common Format and MIME Type for

Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files,” October 2005.

[14] “MessagePack Specification,” msgpack.org.

[15] Mark Slee, Aditya Agarwal, and Marc Kwiatkowski: “Thrift: Scalable Cross-

Language Services Implementation,” Facebook technical report, April 2007.

[16] “Protocol Buffers Developer Guide,” Google, Inc., developers.google.com.

[17] Igor Anishchenko: “Thrift vs Protocol Buffers vs Avro - Biased Comparison,”

slideshare.net, September 17, 2012.

[18] “A Matrix of the Features Each Individual Language Library Supports,”

wiki.apache.org.

[19] Martin Kleppmann: “Schema Evolution in Avro, Protocol Buffers and Thrift,”

martin.kleppmann.com, December 5, 2012.

[20] “Apache Avro 1.7.7 Documentation,” avro.apache.org, July 2014.

[21] Doug Cutting, Chad Walters, Jim Kellerman, et al.: “[PROPOSAL] New Subpro‐

ject: Avro,” email thread on hadoop-general mailing list, mail-archives.apache.org, April 2009.

[22] Tony Hoare: “Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake,” at QCon London, March 2009.

[23] Aditya Auradkar and Tom Quiggle: “Introducing Espresso—LinkedIn’s Hot

New Distributed Document Store,” engineering.linkedin.com, January 21, 2015.

[24] Jay Kreps: “Putting Apache Kafka to Use: A Practical Guide to Building a Stream

Data Platform (Part 2),” blog.confluent.io, February 25, 2015.

[25] Gwen Shapira: “The Problem of Managing Schemas,” radar.oreilly.com, November 4, 2014.

[26] “Apache Pig 0.14.0 Documentation,” pig.apache.org, November 2014.

[27] John Larmouth: ASN.1 Complete. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. ISBN:

978-0-122-33435-1

Summary | 141

[28] Russell Housley, Warwick Ford, Tim Polk, and David Solo: “RFC 2459: Internet

X.509 Public Key Infrastructure: Certificate and CRL Profile,” IETF Network Work‐

ing Group, Standards Track, January 1999.

[29] Lev Walkin: “Question: Extensibility and Dropping Fields,” lionet.info, September 21, 2010.

[30] Jesse James Garrett: “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications,” adaptivepath.com, February 18, 2005.

[31] Sam Newman: Building Microservices. O’Reilly Media, 2015. ISBN:

978-1-491-95035-7

[32] Chris Richardson: “Microservices: Decomposing Applications for Deployability

and Scalability,” infoq.com, May 25, 2014.

[33] Pat Helland: “Data on the Outside Versus Data on the Inside,” at 2nd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2005.

[34] Roy Thomas Fielding: “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based

Software Architectures,” PhD Thesis, University of California, Irvine, 2000.

[35] Roy Thomas Fielding: “REST APIs Must Be Hypertext-Driven,” roy.gbiv.com, October 20 2008.

[36] “REST in Peace, SOAP,” royal.pingdom.com, October 15, 2010.

[37] “Web Services Standards as of Q1 2007,” innoq.com, February 2007.

[38] Pete Lacey: “The S Stands for Simple,” harmful.cat-v.org, November 15, 2006.

[39] Stefan Tilkov: “Interview: Pete Lacey Criticizes Web Services,” infoq.com, December 12, 2006.

[40] “OpenAPI Specification (fka Swagger RESTful API Documentation Specifica‐

tion) Version 2.0,” swagger.io, September 8, 2014.

[41] Michi Henning: “The Rise and Fall of CORBA,” ACM Queue, volume 4, number 5, pages 28–34, June 2006. doi:10.1145/1142031.1142044

[42] Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson: “Implementing Remote Procedure

Calls,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), volume 2, number 1, pages 39–59, February 1984. doi:10.1145/2080.357392

[43] Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, and Sam Kendall: “A Note on Dis‐

tributed Computing,” Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Inc., Technical Report TR-94-29, November 1994.

[44] Steve Vinoski: “Convenience over Correctness,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol‐

ume 12, number 4, pages 89–92, July 2008. doi:10.1109/MIC.2008.75

142 | Chapter 4: Encoding and Evolution

[45] Marius Eriksen: “Your Server as a Function,” at 7th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), November 2013. doi:

10.1145/2525528.2525538

[46] “grpc-common Documentation,” Google, Inc., github.com, February 2015.

[47] Aditya Narayan and Irina Singh: “Designing and Versioning Compatible Web

Services,” ibm.com, March 28, 2007.

[48] Troy Hunt: “Your API Versioning Is Wrong, Which Is Why I Decided to Do It 3

Different Wrong Ways,” troyhunt.com, February 10, 2014.

[49] “API Upgrades,” Stripe, Inc., April 2015.

[50] Jonas Bonér: “Upgrade in an Akka Cluster,” email to akka-user mailing list, grokbase.com, August 28, 2013.

[51] Philip A. Bernstein, Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, et al.: “Orleans: Distributed Vir‐

tual Actors for Programmability and Scalability,” Microsoft Research Technical

Report MSR-TR-2014-41, March 2014.

[52] “Microsoft Project Orleans Documentation,” Microsoft Research, dotnet.github.io, 2015.

[53] David Mercer, Sean Hinde, Yinso Chen, and Richard A O’Keefe: “beginner:

Updating Data Structures,” email thread on erlang-questions mailing list, erlang.com, October 29, 2007.

[54] Fred Hebert: “Postscript: Maps,” learnyousomeerlang.com, April 9, 2014.

Summary | 143

PART II

Distributed Data

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature

cannot be fooled.

—Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report (1986)

In Part I of this book, we discussed aspects of data systems that apply when data is

stored on a single machine. Now, in Part II, we move up a level and ask: what hap‐

pens if multiple machines are involved in storage and retrieval of data?

There are various reasons why you might want to distribute a database across multi‐

ple machines:

Scalability

If your data volume, read load, or write load grows bigger than a single machine

can handle, you can potentially spread the load across multiple machines.

Fault tolerance/high availability

If your application needs to continue working even if one machine (or several

machines, or the network, or an entire datacenter) goes down, you can use multi‐

ple machines to give you redundancy. When one fails, another one can take over.

Latency

If you have users around the world, you might want to have servers at various

locations worldwide so that each user can be served from a datacenter that is geo‐

graphically close to them. That avoids the users having to wait for network pack‐

ets to travel halfway around the world.

Scaling to Higher Load

If all you need is to scale to higher load, the simplest approach is to buy a more pow‐

erful machine (sometimes called vertical scaling or scaling up). Many CPUs, many

RAM chips, and many disks can be joined together under one operating system, and

a fast interconnect allows any CPU to access any part of the memory or disk. In this

kind of shared-memory architecture, all the components can be treated as a single

machine [1]. i

The problem with a shared-memory approach is that the cost grows faster than line‐

arly: a machine with twice as many CPUs, twice as much RAM, and twice as much

disk capacity as another typically costs significantly more than twice as much. And

due to bottlenecks, a machine twice the size cannot necessarily handle twice the load.

A shared-memory architecture may offer limited fault tolerance—high-end machines

have hot-swappable components (you can replace disks, memory modules, and even

CPUs without shutting down the machines)—but it is definitely limited to a single

geographic location.

Another approach is the shared-disk architecture, which uses several machines with

independent CPUs and RAM, but stores data on an array of disks that is shared

between the machines, which are connected via a fast network.ii This architecture is

used for some data warehousing workloads, but contention and the overhead of lock‐

ing limit the scalability of the shared-disk approach [2].

Shared-Nothing Architectures

By contrast, shared-nothing architectures [3] (sometimes called horizontal scaling or scaling out) have gained a lot of popularity. In this approach, each machine or virtual machine running the database software is called a node. Each node uses its CPUs,

RAM, and disks independently. Any coordination between nodes is done at the soft‐

ware level, using a conventional network.

No special hardware is required by a shared-nothing system, so you can use whatever

machines have the best price/performance ratio. You can potentially distribute data

across multiple geographic regions, and thus reduce latency for users and potentially

be able to survive the loss of an entire datacenter. With cloud deployments of virtual

i. In a large machine, although any CPU can access any part of memory, some banks of memory are closer to

one CPU than to others (this is called nonuniform memory access, or NUMA [1]). To make efficient use of this architecture, the processing needs to be broken down so that each CPU mostly accesses memory that is nearby—which means that partitioning is still required, even when ostensibly running on one machine.

ii. Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN).

machines, you don’t need to be operating at Google scale: even for small companies,

a multi-region distributed architecture is now feasible.

In this part of the book, we focus on shared-nothing architectures—not because they

are necessarily the best choice for every use case, but rather because they require the

most caution from you, the application developer. If your data is distributed across

multiple nodes, you need to be aware of the constraints and trade-offs that occur in

such a distributed system—the database cannot magically hide these from you.

While a distributed shared-nothing architecture has many advantages, it usually also

incurs additional complexity for applications and sometimes limits the expressive‐

ness of the data models you can use. In some cases, a simple single-threaded program

can perform significantly better than a cluster with over 100 CPU cores [4]. On the

other hand, shared-nothing systems can be very powerful. The next few chapters go

into details on the issues that arise when data is distributed.

Replication Versus Partitioning

There are two common ways data is distributed across multiple nodes:

Replication

Keeping a copy of the same data on several different nodes, potentially in differ‐

ent locations. Replication provides redundancy: if some nodes are unavailable,

the data can still be served from the remaining nodes. Replication can also help

improve performance. We discuss replication in Chapter 5.

Partitioning

Splitting a big database into smaller subsets called partitions so that different par‐

titions can be assigned to different nodes (also known as sharding). We discuss

partitioning in Chapter 6.

These are separate mechanisms, but they often go hand in hand, as illustrated in

Figure II-1.

Figure II-1. A database split into two partitions, with two replicas per partition.

With an understanding of those concepts, we can discuss the difficult trade-offs that

you need to make in a distributed system. We’ll discuss transactions in Chapter 7, as that will help you understand all the many things that can go wrong in a data system, and what you can do about them. We’ll conclude this part of the book by discussing

the fundamental limitations of distributed systems in Chapters 8 and 9.

Later, in Part III of this book, we will discuss how you can take several (potentially

distributed) datastores and integrate them into a larger system, satisfying the needs of

a complex application. But first, let’s talk about distributed data.

References

[1] Ulrich Drepper: “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory,” akkadia.org, November 21, 2007.

[2] Ben Stopford: “Shared Nothing vs. Shared Disk Architectures: An Independent

View,” benstopford.com, November 24, 2009.

[3] Michael Stonebraker: “The Case for Shared Nothing,” IEEE Database Engineering Bulletin, volume 9, number 1, pages 4–9, March 1986.

[4] Frank McSherry, Michael Isard, and Derek G. Murray: “Scalability! But at What

COST? ,” at 15th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), May 2015.

CHAPTER 5

Replication

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly

go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out

to be impossible to get at or repair.

—Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

Replication means keeping a copy of the same data on multiple machines that are

connected via a network. As discussed in the introduction to Part II, there are several

reasons why you might want to replicate data:

• To keep data geographically close to your users (and thus reduce latency)

• To allow the system to continue working even if some of its parts have failed

(and thus increase availability)

• To scale out the number of machines that can serve read queries (and thus

increase read throughput)

In this chapter we will assume that your dataset is so small that each machine can

hold a copy of the entire dataset. In Chapter 6 we will relax that assumption and dis‐

cuss partitioning ( sharding) of datasets that are too big for a single machine. In later

chapters we will discuss various kinds of faults that can occur in a replicated data sys‐

tem, and how to deal with them.

If the data that you’re replicating does not change over time, then replication is easy:

you just need to copy the data to every node once, and you’re done. All of the diffi‐

culty in replication lies in handling changes to replicated data, and that’s what this

chapter is about. We will discuss three popular algorithms for replicating changes

between nodes: single-leader, multi-leader, and leaderless replication. Almost all distributed databases use one of these three approaches. They all have various pros and cons, which we will examine in detail.

151

There are many trade-offs to consider with replication: for example, whether to use

synchronous or asynchronous replication, and how to handle failed replicas. Those

are often configuration options in databases, and although the details vary by data‐

base, the general principles are similar across many different implementations. We

will discuss the consequences of such choices in this chapter.

Replication of databases is an old topic—the principles haven’t changed much since

they were studied in the 1970s [1], because the fundamental constraints of networks

have remained the same. However, outside of research, many developers continued

to assume for a long time that a database consisted of just one node. Mainstream use

of distributed databases is more recent. Since many application developers are new to

this area, there has been a lot of misunderstanding around issues such as eventual

consistency. In “Problems with Replication Lag” on page 161 we will get more precise about eventual consistency and discuss things like the read-your-writes and monotonic reads guarantees.

Leaders and Followers

Each node that stores a copy of the database is called a replica. With multiple replicas,

a question inevitably arises: how do we ensure that all the data ends up on all the rep‐

licas?

Every write to the database needs to be processed by every replica; otherwise, the rep‐

licas would no longer contain the same data. The most common solution for this is

called leader-based replication (also known as active/passive or master–slave replica‐

tion) and is illustrated in Figure 5-1. It works as follows:

1. One of the replicas is designated the leader (also known as master or primary).

When clients want to write to the database, they must send their requests to the

leader, which first writes the new data to its local storage.

2. The other replicas are known as followers ( read replicas, slaves, secondaries, or hot standbys).i Whenever the leader writes new data to its local storage, it also sends the data change to all of its followers as part of a replication log or change stream.

Each follower takes the log from the leader and updates its local copy of the data‐

base accordingly, by applying all writes in the same order as they were processed

on the leader.

i. Different people have different definitions for hot, warm, and cold standby servers. In PostgreSQL, for example, hot standby is used to refer to a replica that accepts reads from clients, whereas a warm standby processes changes from the leader but doesn’t process any queries from clients. For purposes of this book, the difference isn’t important.

152 | Chapter 5: Replication

3. When a client wants to read from the database, it can query either the leader or

any of the followers. However, writes are only accepted on the leader (the follow‐

ers are read-only from the client’s point of view).

Figure 5-1. Leader-based (master–slave) replication.

This mode of replication is a built-in feature of many relational databases, such as

PostgreSQL (since version 9.0), MySQL, Oracle Data Guard [2], and SQL Server’s

AlwaysOn Availability Groups [3]. It is also used in some nonrelational databases,

including MongoDB, RethinkDB, and Espresso [4]. Finally, leader-based replication

is not restricted to only databases: distributed message brokers such as Kafka [5] and

RabbitMQ highly available queues [6] also use it. Some network filesystems and

replicated block devices such as DRBD are similar.

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Replication

An important detail of a replicated system is whether the replication happens syn‐

chronously or asynchronously. (In relational databases, this is often a configurable

option; other systems are often hardcoded to be either one or the other.)

Think about what happens in Figure 5-1, where the user of a website updates their

profile image. At some point in time, the client sends the update request to the leader;

shortly afterward, it is received by the leader. At some point, the leader forwards the

data change to the followers. Eventually, the leader notifies the client that the update

was successful.

Figure 5-2 shows the communication between various components of the system: the

user’s client, the leader, and two followers. Time flows from left to right. A request or

response message is shown as a thick arrow.

Leaders and Followers | 153

Figure 5-2. Leader-based replication with one synchronous and one asynchronous fol‐

lower.

In the example of Figure 5-2, the replication to follower 1 is synchronous: the leader waits until follower 1 has confirmed that it received the write before reporting success to the user, and before making the write visible to other clients. The replication to

follower 2 is asynchronous: the leader sends the message, but doesn’t wait for a

response from the follower.

The diagram shows that there is a substantial delay before follower 2 processes the

message. Normally, replication is quite fast: most database systems apply changes to

followers in less than a second. However, there is no guarantee of how long it might

take. There are circumstances when followers might fall behind the leader by several

minutes or more; for example, if a follower is recovering from a failure, if the system

is operating near maximum capacity, or if there are network problems between the

nodes.

The advantage of synchronous replication is that the follower is guaranteed to have

an up-to-date copy of the data that is consistent with the leader. If the leader sud‐

denly fails, we can be sure that the data is still available on the follower. The disad‐

vantage is that if the synchronous follower doesn’t respond (because it has crashed,

or there is a network fault, or for any other reason), the write cannot be processed.

The leader must block all writes and wait until the synchronous replica is available

again.

For that reason, it is impractical for all followers to be synchronous: any one node

outage would cause the whole system to grind to a halt. In practice, if you enable syn‐

chronous replication on a database, it usually means that one of the followers is syn‐

chronous, and the others are asynchronous. If the synchronous follower becomes

unavailable or slow, one of the asynchronous followers is made synchronous. This

guarantees that you have an up-to-date copy of the data on at least two nodes: the

154 | Chapter 5: Replication

leader and one synchronous follower. This configuration is sometimes also called

semi-synchronous [7].

Often, leader-based replication is configured to be completely asynchronous. In this

case, if the leader fails and is not recoverable, any writes that have not yet been repli‐

cated to followers are lost. This means that a write is not guaranteed to be durable,

even if it has been confirmed to the client. However, a fully asynchronous configura‐

tion has the advantage that the leader can continue processing writes, even if all of its

followers have fallen behind.

Weakening durability may sound like a bad trade-off, but asynchronous replication is

nevertheless widely used, especially if there are many followers or if they are geo‐

graphically distributed. We will return to this issue in “Problems with Replication

Lag” on page 161.

Research on Replication

It can be a serious problem for asynchronously replicated systems to lose data if the

leader fails, so researchers have continued investigating replication methods that do

not lose data but still provide good performance and availability. For example, chain

replication [8, 9] is a variant of synchronous replication that has been successfully

implemented in a few systems such as Microsoft Azure Storage [10, 11].

There is a strong connection between consistency of replication and consensus (get‐

ting several nodes to agree on a value), and we will explore this area of theory in more

detail in Chapter 9. In this chapter we will concentrate on the simpler forms of repli‐

cation that are most commonly used in databases in practice.

Setting Up New Followers

From time to time, you need to set up new followers—perhaps to increase the num‐

ber of replicas, or to replace failed nodes. How do you ensure that the new follower

has an accurate copy of the leader’s data?

Simply copying data files from one node to another is typically not sufficient: clients

are constantly writing to the database, and the data is always in flux, so a standard file

copy would see different parts of the database at different points in time. The result

might not make any sense.

You could make the files on disk consistent by locking the database (making it

unavailable for writes), but that would go against our goal of high availability. Fortu‐

nately, setting up a follower can usually be done without downtime. Conceptually,

the process looks like this:

Leaders and Followers | 155

1. Take a consistent snapshot of the leader’s database at some point in time—if pos‐

sible, without taking a lock on the entire database. Most databases have this fea‐

ture, as it is also required for backups. In some cases, third-party tools are

needed, such as innobackupex for MySQL [12].

2. Copy the snapshot to the new follower node.

3. The follower connects to the leader and requests all the data changes that have

happened since the snapshot was taken. This requires that the snapshot is associ‐

ated with an exact position in the leader’s replication log. That position has vari‐

ous names: for example, PostgreSQL calls it the log sequence number, and

MySQL calls it the binlog coordinates.

4. When the follower has processed the backlog of data changes since the snapshot,

we say it has caught up. It can now continue to process data changes from the

leader as they happen.

The practical steps of setting up a follower vary significantly by database. In some

systems the process is fully automated, whereas in others it can be a somewhat arcane

multi-step workflow that needs to be manually performed by an administrator.

Handling Node Outages

Any node in the system can go down, perhaps unexpectedly due to a fault, but just as

likely due to planned maintenance (for example, rebooting a machine to install a ker‐

nel security patch). Being able to reboot individual nodes without downtime is a big

advantage for operations and maintenance. Thus, our goal is to keep the system as a

whole running despite individual node failures, and to keep the impact of a node out‐

age as small as possible.

How do you achieve high availability with leader-based replication?

Follower failure: Catch-up recovery

On its local disk, each follower keeps a log of the data changes it has received from

the leader. If a follower crashes and is restarted, or if the network between the leader

and the follower is temporarily interrupted, the follower can recover quite easily:

from its log, it knows the last transaction that was processed before the fault occur‐

red. Thus, the follower can connect to the leader and request all the data changes that

occurred during the time when the follower was disconnected. When it has applied

these changes, it has caught up to the leader and can continue receiving a stream of

data changes as before.

156 | Chapter 5: Replication

Leader failure: Failover

Handling a failure of the leader is trickier: one of the followers needs to be promoted

to be the new leader, clients need to be reconfigured to send their writes to the new

leader, and the other followers need to start consuming data changes from the new

leader. This process is called failover.

Failover can happen manually (an administrator is notified that the leader has failed

and takes the necessary steps to make a new leader) or automatically. An automatic

failover process usually consists of the following steps:

1. Determining that the leader has failed. There are many things that could poten‐

tially go wrong: crashes, power outages, network issues, and more. There is no

foolproof way of detecting what has gone wrong, so most systems simply use a

timeout: nodes frequently bounce messages back and forth between each other,

and if a node doesn’t respond for some period of time—say, 30 seconds—it is

assumed to be dead. (If the leader is deliberately taken down for planned mainte‐

nance, this doesn’t apply.)

2. Choosing a new leader. This could be done through an election process (where

the leader is chosen by a majority of the remaining replicas), or a new leader

could be appointed by a previously elected controller node. The best candidate for

leadership is usually the replica with the most up-to-date data changes from the

old leader (to minimize any data loss). Getting all the nodes to agree on a new

leader is a consensus problem, discussed in detail in Chapter 9.

3. Reconfiguring the system to use the new leader. Clients now need to send

their write requests to the new leader (we discuss this in “Request Routing” on

page 214). If the old leader comes back, it might still believe that it is the leader,

not realizing that the other replicas have forced it to step down. The system

needs to ensure that the old leader becomes a follower and recognizes the new

leader.

Failover is fraught with things that can go wrong:

• If asynchronous replication is used, the new leader may not have received all the

writes from the old leader before it failed. If the former leader rejoins the cluster

after a new leader has been chosen, what should happen to those writes? The new

leader may have received conflicting writes in the meantime. The most common

solution is for the old leader’s unreplicated writes to simply be discarded, which

may violate clients’ durability expectations.

• Discarding writes is especially dangerous if other storage systems outside of the

database need to be coordinated with the database contents. For example, in one

incident at GitHub [13], an out-of-date MySQL follower was promoted to leader.

The database used an autoincrementing counter to assign primary keys to new

Leaders and Followers | 157

rows, but because the new leader’s counter lagged behind the old leader’s, it

reused some primary keys that were previously assigned by the old leader. These

primary keys were also used in a Redis store, so the reuse of primary keys resul‐

ted in inconsistency between MySQL and Redis, which caused some private data

to be disclosed to the wrong users.

• In certain fault scenarios (see Chapter 8), it could happen that two nodes both

believe that they are the leader. This situation is called split brain, and it is dan‐

gerous: if both leaders accept writes, and there is no process for resolving con‐

flicts (see “Multi-Leader Replication” on page 168), data is likely to be lost or

corrupted. As a safety catch, some systems have a mechanism to shut down one

node if two leaders are detected.ii However, if this mechanism is not carefully

designed, you can end up with both nodes being shut down [14].

• What is the right timeout before the leader is declared dead? A longer timeout

means a longer time to recovery in the case where the leader fails. However, if the

timeout is too short, there could be unnecessary failovers. For example, a tempo‐

rary load spike could cause a node’s response time to increase above the timeout,

or a network glitch could cause delayed packets. If the system is already strug‐

gling with high load or network problems, an unnecessary failover is likely to

make the situation worse, not better.

There are no easy solutions to these problems. For this reason, some operations

teams prefer to perform failovers manually, even if the software supports automatic

failover.

These issues—node failures; unreliable networks; and trade-offs around replica con‐

sistency, durability, availability, and latency—are in fact fundamental problems in

distributed systems. In Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 we will discuss them in greater

depth.

Implementation of Replication Logs

How does leader-based replication work under the hood? Several different replica‐

tion methods are used in practice, so let’s look at each one briefly.

Statement-based replication

In the simplest case, the leader logs every write request ( statement) that it executes

and sends that statement log to its followers. For a relational database, this means

that every INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement is forwarded to followers, and each

ii. This approach is known as fencing or, more emphatically, Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).

We will discuss fencing in more detail in “The leader and the lock” on page 301.

158 | Chapter 5: Replication

follower parses and executes that SQL statement as if it had been received from a

client.

Although this may sound reasonable, there are various ways in which this approach

to replication can break down:

• Any statement that calls a nondeterministic function, such as NOW() to get the

current date and time or RAND() to get a random number, is likely to generate a

different value on each replica.

• If statements use an autoincrementing column, or if they depend on the existing

data in the database (e.g., UPDATE … WHERE <some condition> ), they must be

executed in exactly the same order on each replica, or else they may have a differ‐

ent effect. This can be limiting when there are multiple concurrently executing

transactions.

• Statements that have side effects (e.g., triggers, stored procedures, user-defined

functions) may result in different side effects occurring on each replica, unless

the side effects are absolutely deterministic.

It is possible to work around those issues—for example, the leader can replace any

nondeterministic function calls with a fixed return value when the statement is log‐

ged so that the followers all get the same value. However, because there are so many

edge cases, other replication methods are now generally preferred.

Statement-based replication was used in MySQL before version 5.1. It is still some‐

times used today, as it is quite compact, but by default MySQL now switches to row-

based replication (discussed shortly) if there is any nondeterminism in a statement.

VoltDB uses statement-based replication, and makes it safe by requiring transactions

to be deterministic [15].

Write-ahead log (WAL) shipping

In Chapter 3 we discussed how storage engines represent data on disk, and we found

that usually every write is appended to a log:

• In the case of a log-structured storage engine (see “SSTables and LSM-Trees” on

page 76), this log is the main place for storage. Log segments are compacted and

garbage-collected in the background.

• In the case of a B-tree (see “B-Trees” on page 79), which overwrites individual

disk blocks, every modification is first written to a write-ahead log so that the

index can be restored to a consistent state after a crash.

In either case, the log is an append-only sequence of bytes containing all writes to the

database. We can use the exact same log to build a replica on another node: besides

writing the log to disk, the leader also sends it across the network to its followers.

Leaders and Followers | 159

When the follower processes this log, it builds a copy of the exact same data struc‐

tures as found on the leader.

This method of replication is used in PostgreSQL and Oracle, among others [16]. The

main disadvantage is that the log describes the data on a very low level: a WAL con‐

tains details of which bytes were changed in which disk blocks. This makes replica‐

tion closely coupled to the storage engine. If the database changes its storage format

from one version to another, it is typically not possible to run different versions of

the database software on the leader and the followers.

That may seem like a minor implementation detail, but it can have a big operational

impact. If the replication protocol allows the follower to use a newer software version

than the leader, you can perform a zero-downtime upgrade of the database software

by first upgrading the followers and then performing a failover to make one of the

upgraded nodes the new leader. If the replication protocol does not allow this version

mismatch, as is often the case with WAL shipping, such upgrades require downtime.

Logical (row-based) log replication

An alternative is to use different log formats for replication and for the storage

engine, which allows the replication log to be decoupled from the storage engine

internals. This kind of replication log is called a logical log, to distinguish it from the

storage engine’s ( physical) data representation.

A logical log for a relational database is usually a sequence of records describing

writes to database tables at the granularity of a row:

• For an inserted row, the log contains the new values of all columns.

• For a deleted row, the log contains enough information to uniquely identify the

row that was deleted. Typically this would be the primary key, but if there is no

primary key on the table, the old values of all columns need to be logged.

• For an updated row, the log contains enough information to uniquely identify

the updated row, and the new values of all columns (or at least the new values of

all columns that changed).

A transaction that modifies several rows generates several such log records, followed

by a record indicating that the transaction was committed. MySQL’s binlog (when

configured to use row-based replication) uses this approach [17].

Since a logical log is decoupled from the storage engine internals, it can more easily

be kept backward compatible, allowing the leader and the follower to run different

versions of the database software, or even different storage engines.

A logical log format is also easier for external applications to parse. This aspect is use‐

ful if you want to send the contents of a database to an external system, such as a data

160 | Chapter 5: Replication

warehouse for offline analysis, or for building custom indexes and caches [18]. This technique is called change data capture, and we will return to it in Chapter 11.

Trigger-based replication

The replication approaches described so far are implemented by the database system,

without involving any application code. In many cases, that’s what you want—but

there are some circumstances where more flexibility is needed. For example, if you

want to only replicate a subset of the data, or want to replicate from one kind of

database to another, or if you need conflict resolution logic (see “Handling Write

Conflicts” on page 171), then you may need to move replication up to the application

layer.

Some tools, such as Oracle GoldenGate [19], can make data changes available to an

application by reading the database log. An alternative is to use features that are

available in many relational databases: triggers and stored procedures.

A trigger lets you register custom application code that is automatically executed

when a data change (write transaction) occurs in a database system. The trigger has

the opportunity to log this change into a separate table, from which it can be read by

an external process. That external process can then apply any necessary application

logic and replicate the data change to another system. Databus for Oracle [20] and

Bucardo for Postgres [21] work like this, for example.

Trigger-based replication typically has greater overheads than other replication

methods, and is more prone to bugs and limitations than the database’s built-in repli‐

cation. However, it can nevertheless be useful due to its flexibility.

Problems with Replication Lag

Being able to tolerate node failures is just one reason for wanting replication. As

mentioned in the introduction to Part II, other reasons are scalability (processing

more requests than a single machine can handle) and latency (placing replicas geo‐

graphically closer to users).

Leader-based replication requires all writes to go through a single node, but read-

only queries can go to any replica. For workloads that consist of mostly reads and

only a small percentage of writes (a common pattern on the web), there is an attrac‐

tive option: create many followers, and distribute the read requests across those fol‐

lowers. This removes load from the leader and allows read requests to be served by

nearby replicas.

In this read-scaling architecture, you can increase the capacity for serving read-only

requests simply by adding more followers. However, this approach only realistically

works with asynchronous replication—if you tried to synchronously replicate to all

followers, a single node failure or network outage would make the entire system

Problems with Replication Lag | 161

unavailable for writing. And the more nodes you have, the likelier it is that one will

be down, so a fully synchronous configuration would be very unreliable.

Unfortunately, if an application reads from an asynchronous follower, it may see out‐

dated information if the follower has fallen behind. This leads to apparent inconsis‐

tencies in the database: if you run the same query on the leader and a follower at the

same time, you may get different results, because not all writes have been reflected in

the follower. This inconsistency is just a temporary state—if you stop writing to the

database and wait a while, the followers will eventually catch up and become consis‐

tent with the leader. For that reason, this effect is known as eventual consistency [22,

23].iii

The term “eventually” is deliberately vague: in general, there is no limit to how far a

replica can fall behind. In normal operation, the delay between a write happening on

the leader and being reflected on a follower—the replication lag—may be only a frac‐

tion of a second, and not noticeable in practice. However, if the system is operating

near capacity or if there is a problem in the network, the lag can easily increase to

several seconds or even minutes.

When the lag is so large, the inconsistencies it introduces are not just a theoretical

issue but a real problem for applications. In this section we will highlight three exam‐

ples of problems that are likely to occur when there is replication lag and outline

some approaches to solving them.

Reading Your Own Writes

Many applications let the user submit some data and then view what they have sub‐

mitted. This might be a record in a customer database, or a comment on a discussion

thread, or something else of that sort. When new data is submitted, it must be sent to

the leader, but when the user views the data, it can be read from a follower. This is

especially appropriate if data is frequently viewed but only occasionally written.

With asynchronous replication, there is a problem, illustrated in Figure 5-3: if the

user views the data shortly after making a write, the new data may not yet have

reached the replica. To the user, it looks as though the data they submitted was lost,

so they will be understandably unhappy.

iii. The term eventual consistency was coined by Douglas Terry et al. [24], popularized by Werner Vogels [22], and became the battle cry of many NoSQL projects. However, not only NoSQL databases are eventually

consistent: followers in an asynchronously replicated relational database have the same characteristics.

162 | Chapter 5: Replication

Figure 5-3. A user makes a write, followed by a read from a stale replica. To prevent

this anomaly, we need read-after-write consistency.

In this situation, we need read-after-write consistency, also known as read-your-writes

consistency [24]. This is a guarantee that if the user reloads the page, they will always

see any updates they submitted themselves. It makes no promises about other users:

other users’ updates may not be visible until some later time. However, it reassures

the user that their own input has been saved correctly.

How can we implement read-after-write consistency in a system with leader-based

replication? There are various possible techniques. To mention a few:

• When reading something that the user may have modified, read it from the

leader; otherwise, read it from a follower. This requires that you have some way

of knowing whether something might have been modified, without actually

querying it. For example, user profile information on a social network is nor‐

mally only editable by the owner of the profile, not by anybody else. Thus, a sim‐

ple rule is: always read the user’s own profile from the leader, and any other

users’ profiles from a follower.

• If most things in the application are potentially editable by the user, that

approach won’t be effective, as most things would have to be read from the

leader (negating the benefit of read scaling). In that case, other criteria may be

used to decide whether to read from the leader. For example, you could track the

time of the last update and, for one minute after the last update, make all reads

from the leader. You could also monitor the replication lag on followers and pre‐

vent queries on any follower that is more than one minute behind the leader.

• The client can remember the timestamp of its most recent write—then the sys‐

tem can ensure that the replica serving any reads for that user reflects updates at

least until that timestamp. If a replica is not sufficiently up to date, either the read

can be handled by another replica or the query can wait until the replica has

Problems with Replication Lag | 163

caught up. The timestamp could be a logical timestamp (something that indicates

ordering of writes, such as the log sequence number) or the actual system clock

(in which case clock synchronization becomes critical; see “Unreliable Clocks”

on page 287).

• If your replicas are distributed across multiple datacenters (for geographical

proximity to users or for availability), there is additional complexity. Any request

that needs to be served by the leader must be routed to the datacenter that con‐

tains the leader.

Another complication arises when the same user is accessing your service from mul‐

tiple devices, for example a desktop web browser and a mobile app. In this case you

may want to provide cross-device read-after-write consistency: if the user enters some

information on one device and then views it on another device, they should see the

information they just entered.

In this case, there are some additional issues to consider:

• Approaches that require remembering the timestamp of the user’s last update

become more difficult, because the code running on one device doesn’t know

what updates have happened on the other device. This metadata will need to be

centralized.

• If your replicas are distributed across different datacenters, there is no guarantee

that connections from different devices will be routed to the same datacenter.

(For example, if the user’s desktop computer uses the home broadband connec‐

tion and their mobile device uses the cellular data network, the devices’ network

routes may be completely different.) If your approach requires reading from the

leader, you may first need to route requests from all of a user’s devices to the

same datacenter.

Monotonic Reads

Our second example of an anomaly that can occur when reading from asynchronous

followers is that it’s possible for a user to see things moving backward in time.

This can happen if a user makes several reads from different replicas. For example,

Figure 5-4 shows user 2345 making the same query twice, first to a follower with little lag, then to a follower with greater lag. (This scenario is quite likely if the user refreshes a web page, and each request is routed to a random server.) The first query

returns a comment that was recently added by user 1234, but the second query

doesn’t return anything because the lagging follower has not yet picked up that write.

In effect, the second query is observing the system at an earlier point in time than the

first query. This wouldn’t be so bad if the first query hadn’t returned anything,

because user 2345 probably wouldn’t know that user 1234 had recently added a com‐

164 | Chapter 5: Replication

ment. However, it’s very confusing for user 2345 if they first see user 1234’s comment

appear, and then see it disappear again.

Figure 5-4. A user first reads from a fresh replica, then from a stale replica. Time

appears to go backward. To prevent this anomaly, we need monotonic reads.

Monotonic reads [23] is a guarantee that this kind of anomaly does not happen. It’s a

lesser guarantee than strong consistency, but a stronger guarantee than eventual con‐

sistency. When you read data, you may see an old value; monotonic reads only means

that if one user makes several reads in sequence, they will not see time go backward—

i.e., they will not read older data after having previously read newer data.

One way of achieving monotonic reads is to make sure that each user always makes

their reads from the same replica (different users can read from different replicas).

For example, the replica can be chosen based on a hash of the user ID, rather than

randomly. However, if that replica fails, the user’s queries will need to be rerouted to

another replica.

Consistent Prefix Reads

Our third example of replication lag anomalies concerns violation of causality. Imag‐

ine the following short dialog between Mr. Poons and Mrs. Cake:

Mr. Poons

How far into the future can you see, Mrs. Cake?

Mrs. Cake

About ten seconds usually, Mr. Poons.

Problems with Replication Lag | 165

There is a causal dependency between those two sentences: Mrs. Cake heard Mr.

Poons’s question and answered it.

Now, imagine a third person is listening to this conversation through followers. The

things said by Mrs. Cake go through a follower with little lag, but the things said by

Mr. Poons have a longer replication lag (see Figure 5-5). This observer would hear

the following:

Mrs. Cake

About ten seconds usually, Mr. Poons.

Mr. Poons

How far into the future can you see, Mrs. Cake?

To the observer it looks as though Mrs. Cake is answering the question before Mr.

Poons has even asked it. Such psychic powers are impressive, but very confusing [25].

Figure 5-5. If some partitions are replicated slower than others, an observer may see the

answer before they see the question.

Preventing this kind of anomaly requires another type of guarantee: consistent prefix

reads [23]. This guarantee says that if a sequence of writes happens in a certain order, then anyone reading those writes will see them appear in the same order.

This is a particular problem in partitioned (sharded) databases, which we will discuss

in Chapter 6. If the database always applies writes in the same order, reads always see

a consistent prefix, so this anomaly cannot happen. However, in many distributed

166 | Chapter 5: Replication

databases, different partitions operate independently, so there is no global ordering of

writes: when a user reads from the database, they may see some parts of the database

in an older state and some in a newer state.

One solution is to make sure that any writes that are causally related to each other are

written to the same partition—but in some applications that cannot be done effi‐

ciently. There are also algorithms that explicitly keep track of causal dependencies, a

topic that we will return to in “The “happens-before” relationship and concurrency”

on page 186.

Solutions for Replication Lag

When working with an eventually consistent system, it is worth thinking about how

the application behaves if the replication lag increases to several minutes or even

hours. If the answer is “no problem,” that’s great. However, if the result is a bad expe‐

rience for users, it’s important to design the system to provide a stronger guarantee,

such as read-after-write. Pretending that replication is synchronous when in fact it is

asynchronous is a recipe for problems down the line.

As discussed earlier, there are ways in which an application can provide a stronger

guarantee than the underlying database—for example, by performing certain kinds of

reads on the leader. However, dealing with these issues in application code is com‐

plex and easy to get wrong.

It would be better if application developers didn’t have to worry about subtle replica‐

tion issues and could just trust their databases to “do the right thing.” This is why

transactions exist: they are a way for a database to provide stronger guarantees so that

the application can be simpler.

Single-node transactions have existed for a long time. However, in the move to dis‐

tributed (replicated and partitioned) databases, many systems have abandoned them,

claiming that transactions are too expensive in terms of performance and availability,

and asserting that eventual consistency is inevitable in a scalable system. There is

some truth in that statement, but it is overly simplistic, and we will develop a more

nuanced view over the course of the rest of this book. We will return to the topic of

transactions in Chapters 7 and 9, and we will discuss some alternative mechanisms in

Part III.

Problems with Replication Lag | 167

Multi-Leader Replication

So far in this chapter we have only considered replication architectures using a single

leader. Although that is a common approach, there are interesting alternatives.

Leader-based replication has one major downside: there is only one leader, and all

writes must go through it.iv If you can’t connect to the leader for any reason, for

example due to a network interruption between you and the leader, you can’t write to

the database.

A natural extension of the leader-based replication model is to allow more than one

node to accept writes. Replication still happens in the same way: each node that pro‐

cesses a write must forward that data change to all the other nodes. We call this a

multi-leader configuration (also known as master–master or active/active replication).

In this setup, each leader simultaneously acts as a follower to the other leaders.

Use Cases for Multi-Leader Replication

It rarely makes sense to use a multi-leader setup within a single datacenter, because

the benefits rarely outweigh the added complexity. However, there are some situa‐

tions in which this configuration is reasonable.

Multi-datacenter operation

Imagine you have a database with replicas in several different datacenters (perhaps so

that you can tolerate failure of an entire datacenter, or perhaps in order to be closer

to your users). With a normal leader-based replication setup, the leader has to be in

one of the datacenters, and all writes must go through that datacenter.

In a multi-leader configuration, you can have a leader in each datacenter. Figure 5-6

shows what this architecture might look like. Within each datacenter, regular leader–

follower replication is used; between datacenters, each datacenter’s leader replicates

its changes to the leaders in other datacenters.

iv. If the database is partitioned (see Chapter 6), each partition has one leader. Different partitions may have

their leaders on different nodes, but each partition must nevertheless have one leader node.

168 | Chapter 5: Replication

Figure 5-6. Multi-leader replication across multiple datacenters.

Let’s compare how the single-leader and multi-leader configurations fare in a multi-

datacenter deployment:

Performance

In a single-leader configuration, every write must go over the internet to the

datacenter with the leader. This can add significant latency to writes and might

contravene the purpose of having multiple datacenters in the first place. In a

multi-leader configuration, every write can be processed in the local datacenter

and is replicated asynchronously to the other datacenters. Thus, the inter-

datacenter network delay is hidden from users, which means the perceived per‐

formance may be better.

Tolerance of datacenter outages

In a single-leader configuration, if the datacenter with the leader fails, failover

can promote a follower in another datacenter to be leader. In a multi-leader con‐

figuration, each datacenter can continue operating independently of the others,

and replication catches up when the failed datacenter comes back online.

Tolerance of network problems

Traffic between datacenters usually goes over the public internet, which may be

less reliable than the local network within a datacenter. A single-leader configu‐

ration is very sensitive to problems in this inter-datacenter link, because writes

are made synchronously over this link. A multi-leader configuration with asyn‐

chronous replication can usually tolerate network problems better: a temporary

network interruption does not prevent writes being processed.

Multi-Leader Replication | 169

Some databases support multi-leader configurations by default, but it is also often

implemented with external tools, such as Tungsten Replicator for MySQL [26], BDR

for PostgreSQL [27], and GoldenGate for Oracle [19].

Although multi-leader replication has advantages, it also has a big downside: the

same data may be concurrently modified in two different datacenters, and those write

conflicts must be resolved (indicated as “conflict resolution” in Figure 5-6). We will

discuss this issue in “Handling Write Conflicts” on page 171.

As multi-leader replication is a somewhat retrofitted feature in many databases, there

are often subtle configuration pitfalls and surprising interactions with other database

features. For example, autoincrementing keys, triggers, and integrity constraints can

be problematic. For this reason, multi-leader replication is often considered danger‐

ous territory that should be avoided if possible [28].

Clients with offline operation

Another situation in which multi-leader replication is appropriate is if you have an

application that needs to continue to work while it is disconnected from the internet.

For example, consider the calendar apps on your mobile phone, your laptop, and

other devices. You need to be able to see your meetings (make read requests) and

enter new meetings (make write requests) at any time, regardless of whether your

device currently has an internet connection. If you make any changes while you are

offline, they need to be synced with a server and your other devices when the device

is next online.

In this case, every device has a local database that acts as a leader (it accepts write

requests), and there is an asynchronous multi-leader replication process (sync)

between the replicas of your calendar on all of your devices. The replication lag may

be hours or even days, depending on when you have internet access available.

From an architectural point of view, this setup is essentially the same as multi-leader

replication between datacenters, taken to the extreme: each device is a “datacenter,”

and the network connection between them is extremely unreliable. As the rich his‐

tory of broken calendar sync implementations demonstrates, multi-leader replication

is a tricky thing to get right.

There are tools that aim to make this kind of multi-leader configuration easier. For

example, CouchDB is designed for this mode of operation [29].

Collaborative editing

Real-time collaborative editing applications allow several people to edit a document

simultaneously. For example, Etherpad [30] and Google Docs [31] allow multiple

people to concurrently edit a text document or spreadsheet (the algorithm is briefly

discussed in “Automatic Conflict Resolution” on page 174).

170 | Chapter 5: Replication

We don’t usually think of collaborative editing as a database replication problem, but

it has a lot in common with the previously mentioned offline editing use case. When

one user edits a document, the changes are instantly applied to their local replica (the

state of the document in their web browser or client application) and asynchronously

replicated to the server and any other users who are editing the same document.

If you want to guarantee that there will be no editing conflicts, the application must

obtain a lock on the document before a user can edit it. If another user wants to edit

the same document, they first have to wait until the first user has committed their

changes and released the lock. This collaboration model is equivalent to single-leader

replication with transactions on the leader.

However, for faster collaboration, you may want to make the unit of change very

small (e.g., a single keystroke) and avoid locking. This approach allows multiple users

to edit simultaneously, but it also brings all the challenges of multi-leader replication,

including requiring conflict resolution [32].

Handling Write Conflicts

The biggest problem with multi-leader replication is that write conflicts can occur,

which means that conflict resolution is required.

For example, consider a wiki page that is simultaneously being edited by two users, as

shown in Figure 5-7. User 1 changes the title of the page from A to B, and user 2

changes the title from A to C at the same time. Each user’s change is successfully

applied to their local leader. However, when the changes are asynchronously replica‐

ted, a conflict is detected [33]. This problem does not occur in a single-leader data‐

base.

Figure 5-7. A write conflict caused by two leaders concurrently updating the same

record.

Multi-Leader Replication | 171

Synchronous versus asynchronous conflict detection

In a single-leader database, the second writer will either block and wait for the first

write to complete, or abort the second write transaction, forcing the user to retry the

write. On the other hand, in a multi-leader setup, both writes are successful, and the

conflict is only detected asynchronously at some later point in time. At that time, it

may be too late to ask the user to resolve the conflict.

In principle, you could make the conflict detection synchronous—i.e., wait for the

write to be replicated to all replicas before telling the user that the write was success‐

ful. However, by doing so, you would lose the main advantage of multi-leader repli‐

cation: allowing each replica to accept writes independently. If you want synchronous

conflict detection, you might as well just use single-leader replication.

Conflict avoidance

The simplest strategy for dealing with conflicts is to avoid them: if the application can

ensure that all writes for a particular record go through the same leader, then con‐

flicts cannot occur. Since many implementations of multi-leader replication handle

conflicts quite poorly, avoiding conflicts is a frequently recommended approach [34].

For example, in an application where a user can edit their own data, you can ensure

that requests from a particular user are always routed to the same datacenter and use

the leader in that datacenter for reading and writing. Different users may have differ‐

ent “home” datacenters (perhaps picked based on geographic proximity to the user),

but from any one user’s point of view the configuration is essentially single-leader.

However, sometimes you might want to change the designated leader for a record—

perhaps because one datacenter has failed and you need to reroute traffic to another

datacenter, or perhaps because a user has moved to a different location and is now

closer to a different datacenter. In this situation, conflict avoidance breaks down, and

you have to deal with the possibility of concurrent writes on different leaders.

Converging toward a consistent state

A single-leader database applies writes in a sequential order: if there are several

updates to the same field, the last write determines the final value of the field.

In a multi-leader configuration, there is no defined ordering of writes, so it’s not clear

what the final value should be. In Figure 5-7, at leader 1 the title is first updated to B

and then to C; at leader 2 it is first updated to C and then to B. Neither order is “more

correct” than the other.

If each replica simply applied writes in the order that it saw the writes, the database

would end up in an inconsistent state: the final value would be C at leader 1 and B at

leader 2. That is not acceptable—every replication scheme must ensure that the data

is eventually the same in all replicas. Thus, the database must resolve the conflict in a

172 | Chapter 5: Replication

convergent way, which means that all replicas must arrive at the same final value

when all changes have been replicated.

There are various ways of achieving convergent conflict resolution:

• Give each write a unique ID (e.g., a timestamp, a long random number, a UUID,

or a hash of the key and value), pick the write with the highest ID as the winner,

and throw away the other writes. If a timestamp is used, this technique is known

as last write wins (LWW). Although this approach is popular, it is dangerously

prone to data loss [35]. We will discuss LWW in more detail at the end of this

chapter (“Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184).

• Give each replica a unique ID, and let writes that originated at a higher-

numbered replica always take precedence over writes that originated at a lower-

numbered replica. This approach also implies data loss.

• Somehow merge the values together—e.g., order them alphabetically and then

concatenate them (in Figure 5-7, the merged title might be something like

“B/C”).

• Record the conflict in an explicit data structure that preserves all information,

and write application code that resolves the conflict at some later time (perhaps

by prompting the user).

Custom conflict resolution logic

As the most appropriate way of resolving a conflict may depend on the application,

most multi-leader replication tools let you write conflict resolution logic using appli‐

cation code. That code may be executed on write or on read:

On write

As soon as the database system detects a conflict in the log of replicated changes,

it calls the conflict handler. For example, Bucardo allows you to write a snippet of

Perl for this purpose. This handler typically cannot prompt a user—it runs in a

background process and it must execute quickly.

On read

When a conflict is detected, all the conflicting writes are stored. The next time

the data is read, these multiple versions of the data are returned to the applica‐

tion. The application may prompt the user or automatically resolve the conflict,

and write the result back to the database. CouchDB works this way, for example.

Note that conflict resolution usually applies at the level of an individual row or docu‐

ment, not for an entire transaction [36]. Thus, if you have a transaction that atomi‐

cally makes several different writes (see Chapter 7), each write is still considered

separately for the purposes of conflict resolution.

Multi-Leader Replication | 173

Automatic Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution rules can quickly become complicated, and custom code can be

error-prone. Amazon is a frequently cited example of surprising effects due to a con‐

flict resolution handler: for some time, the conflict resolution logic on the shopping

cart would preserve items added to the cart, but not items removed from the cart.

Thus, customers would sometimes see items reappearing in their carts even though

they had previously been removed [37].

There has been some interesting research into automatically resolving conflicts

caused by concurrent data modifications. A few lines of research are worth mention‐

ing:

• Conflict-free replicated datatypes (CRDTs) [32, 38] are a family of data structures

for sets, maps, ordered lists, counters, etc. that can be concurrently edited by

multiple users, and which automatically resolve conflicts in sensible ways. Some

CRDTs have been implemented in Riak 2.0 [39, 40].

• Mergeable persistent data structures [41] track history explicitly, similarly to the Git version control system, and use a three-way merge function (whereas CRDTs use two-way merges).

• Operational transformation [42] is the conflict resolution algorithm behind col‐

laborative editing applications such as Etherpad [30] and Google Docs [31]. It was designed particularly for concurrent editing of an ordered list of items, such as the list of characters that constitute a text document.

Implementations of these algorithms in databases are still young, but it’s likely that

they will be integrated into more replicated data systems in the future. Automatic

conflict resolution could make multi-leader data synchronization much simpler for

applications to deal with.

What is a conflict?

Some kinds of conflict are obvious. In the example in Figure 5-7, two writes concur‐

rently modified the same field in the same record, setting it to two different values.

There is little doubt that this is a conflict.

Other kinds of conflict can be more subtle to detect. For example, consider a meeting

room booking system: it tracks which room is booked by which group of people at

which time. This application needs to ensure that each room is only booked by one

group of people at any one time (i.e., there must not be any overlapping bookings for

the same room). In this case, a conflict may arise if two different bookings are created

for the same room at the same time. Even if the application checks availability before

174 | Chapter 5: Replication

allowing a user to make a booking, there can be a conflict if the two bookings are

made on two different leaders.

There isn’t a quick ready-made answer, but in the following chapters we will trace a

path toward a good understanding of this problem. We will see some more examples

of conflicts in Chapter 7, and in Chapter 12 we will discuss scalable approaches for detecting and resolving conflicts in a replicated system.

Multi-Leader Replication Topologies

A replication topology describes the communication paths along which writes are

propagated from one node to another. If you have two leaders, like in Figure 5-7,

there is only one plausible topology: leader 1 must send all of its writes to leader 2,

and vice versa. With more than two leaders, various different topologies are possible.

Some examples are illustrated in Figure 5-8.

Figure 5-8. Three example topologies in which multi-leader replication can be set up.

The most general topology is all-to-all (Figure 5-8 [c]), in which every leader sends its writes to every other leader. However, more restricted topologies are also used: for example, MySQL by default supports only a circular topology [34], in which each

node receives writes from one node and forwards those writes (plus any writes of its

own) to one other node. Another popular topology has the shape of a star:v one desig‐

nated root node forwards writes to all of the other nodes. The star topology can be

generalized to a tree.

In circular and star topologies, a write may need to pass through several nodes before

it reaches all replicas. Therefore, nodes need to forward data changes they receive

from other nodes. To prevent infinite replication loops, each node is given a unique

identifier, and in the replication log, each write is tagged with the identifiers of all the

nodes it has passed through [43]. When a node receives a data change that is tagged

v. Not to be confused with a star schema (see “Stars and Snowflakes: Schemas for Analytics” on page 93), which describes the structure of a data model, not the communication topology between nodes.

Multi-Leader Replication | 175

with its own identifier, that data change is ignored, because the node knows that it

has already been processed.

A problem with circular and star topologies is that if just one node fails, it can inter‐

rupt the flow of replication messages between other nodes, causing them to be unable

to communicate until the node is fixed. The topology could be reconfigured to work

around the failed node, but in most deployments such reconfiguration would have to

be done manually. The fault tolerance of a more densely connected topology (such as

all-to-all) is better because it allows messages to travel along different paths, avoiding

a single point of failure.

On the other hand, all-to-all topologies can have issues too. In particular, some net‐

work links may be faster than others (e.g., due to network congestion), with the result

that some replication messages may “overtake” others, as illustrated in Figure 5-9.

Figure 5-9. With multi-leader replication, writes may arrive in the wrong order at some

replicas.

In Figure 5-9, client A inserts a row into a table on leader 1, and client B updates that row on leader 3. However, leader 2 may receive the writes in a different order: it may first receive the update (which, from its point of view, is an update to a row that does

not exist in the database) and only later receive the corresponding insert (which

should have preceded the update).

This is a problem of causality, similar to the one we saw in “Consistent Prefix Reads”

on page 165: the update depends on the prior insert, so we need to make sure that all

nodes process the insert first, and then the update. Simply attaching a timestamp to

176 | Chapter 5: Replication

every write is not sufficient, because clocks cannot be trusted to be sufficiently in sync

to correctly order these events at leader 2 (see Chapter 8).

To order these events correctly, a technique called version vectors can be used, which

we will discuss later in this chapter (see “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184).

However, conflict detection techniques are poorly implemented in many multi-leader

replication systems. For example, at the time of writing, PostgreSQL BDR does not

provide causal ordering of writes [27], and Tungsten Replicator for MySQL doesn’t

even try to detect conflicts [34].

If you are using a system with multi-leader replication, it is worth being aware of

these issues, carefully reading the documentation, and thoroughly testing your data‐

base to ensure that it really does provide the guarantees you believe it to have.

Leaderless Replication

The replication approaches we have discussed so far in this chapter—single-leader

and multi-leader replication—are based on the idea that a client sends a write request

to one node (the leader), and the database system takes care of copying that write to

the other replicas. A leader determines the order in which writes should be processed,

and followers apply the leader’s writes in the same order.

Some data storage systems take a different approach, abandoning the concept of a

leader and allowing any replica to directly accept writes from clients. Some of the ear‐

liest replicated data systems were leaderless [1, 44], but the idea was mostly forgotten during the era of dominance of relational databases. It once again became a fashiona-ble architecture for databases after Amazon used it for its in-house Dynamo system [37]. vi Riak, Cassandra, and Voldemort are open source datastores with leaderless

replication models inspired by Dynamo, so this kind of database is also known as

Dynamo-style.

In some leaderless implementations, the client directly sends its writes to several rep‐

licas, while in others, a coordinator node does this on behalf of the client. However,

unlike a leader database, that coordinator does not enforce a particular ordering of

writes. As we shall see, this difference in design has profound consequences for the

way the database is used.

Writing to the Database When a Node Is Down

Imagine you have a database with three replicas, and one of the replicas is currently

unavailable—perhaps it is being rebooted to install a system update. In a leader-based

vi. Dynamo is not available to users outside of Amazon. Confusingly, AWS offers a hosted database product

called DynamoDB, which uses a completely different architecture: it is based on single-leader replication.

Leaderless Replication | 177

configuration, if you want to continue processing writes, you may need to perform a

failover (see “Handling Node Outages” on page 156).

On the other hand, in a leaderless configuration, failover does not exist. Figure 5-10

shows what happens: the client (user 1234) sends the write to all three replicas in par‐

allel, and the two available replicas accept the write but the unavailable replica misses

it. Let’s say that it’s sufficient for two out of three replicas to acknowledge the write:

after user 1234 has received two ok responses, we consider the write to be successful.

The client simply ignores the fact that one of the replicas missed the write.

Figure 5-10. A quorum write, quorum read, and read repair after a node outage.

Now imagine that the unavailable node comes back online, and clients start reading

from it. Any writes that happened while the node was down are missing from that

node. Thus, if you read from that node, you may get stale (outdated) values as

responses.

To solve that problem, when a client reads from the database, it doesn’t just send its

request to one replica: read requests are also sent to several nodes in parallel. The cli‐

ent may get different responses from different nodes; i.e., the up-to-date value from

one node and a stale value from another. Version numbers are used to determine

which value is newer (see “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184).

Read repair and anti-entropy

The replication scheme should ensure that eventually all the data is copied to every

replica. After an unavailable node comes back online, how does it catch up on the

writes that it missed?

178 | Chapter 5: Replication

Two mechanisms are often used in Dynamo-style datastores:

Read repair

When a client makes a read from several nodes in parallel, it can detect any stale

responses. For example, in Figure 5-10, user 2345 gets a version 6 value from rep‐

lica 3 and a version 7 value from replicas 1 and 2. The client sees that replica 3

has a stale value and writes the newer value back to that replica. This approach

works well for values that are frequently read.

Anti-entropy process

In addition, some datastores have a background process that constantly looks for

differences in the data between replicas and copies any missing data from one

replica to another. Unlike the replication log in leader-based replication, this

anti-entropy process does not copy writes in any particular order, and there may

be a significant delay before data is copied.

Not all systems implement both of these; for example, Voldemort currently does not

have an anti-entropy process. Note that without an anti-entropy process, values that

are rarely read may be missing from some replicas and thus have reduced durability,

because read repair is only performed when a value is read by the application.

Quorums for reading and writing

In the example of Figure 5-10, we considered the write to be successful even though it

was only processed on two out of three replicas. What if only one out of three replicas

accepted the write? How far can we push this?

If we know that every successful write is guaranteed to be present on at least two out

of three replicas, that means at most one replica can be stale. Thus, if we read from at

least two replicas, we can be sure that at least one of the two is up to date. If the third

replica is down or slow to respond, reads can nevertheless continue returning an up-

to-date value.

More generally, if there are n replicas, every write must be confirmed by w nodes to

be considered successful, and we must query at least r nodes for each read. (In our

example, n = 3, w = 2, r = 2.) As long as w + r > n, we expect to get an up-to-date value when reading, because at least one of the r nodes we’re reading from must be up to date. Reads and writes that obey these r and w values are called quorum reads and writes [44]. vii You can think of r and w as the minimum number of votes required for the read or write to be valid.

vii. Sometimes this kind of quorum is called a strict quorum, to contrast with sloppy quorums (discussed in

“Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff” on page 183).

Leaderless Replication | 179

In Dynamo-style databases, the parameters n, w, and r are typically configurable. A common choice is to make n an odd number (typically 3 or 5) and to set w = r =

( n + 1) / 2 (rounded up). However, you can vary the numbers as you see fit. For

example, a workload with few writes and many reads may benefit from setting w = n

and r = 1. This makes reads faster, but has the disadvantage that just one failed node

causes all database writes to fail.

There may be more than n nodes in the cluster, but any given value

is stored only on n nodes. This allows the dataset to be partitioned,

supporting datasets that are larger than you can fit on one node.

We will return to partitioning in Chapter 6.

The quorum condition, w + r > n, allows the system to tolerate unavailable nodes as follows:

• If w < n, we can still process writes if a node is unavailable.

• If r < n, we can still process reads if a node is unavailable.

• With n = 3, w = 2, r = 2 we can tolerate one unavailable node.

• With n = 5, w = 3, r = 3 we can tolerate two unavailable nodes. This case is illus‐

trated in Figure 5-11.

• Normally, reads and writes are always sent to all n replicas in parallel. The

parameters w and r determine how many nodes we wait for—i.e., how many of

the n nodes need to report success before we consider the read or write to be suc‐

cessful.

Figure 5-11. If w + r > n, at least one of the r replicas you read from must have seen the

most recent successful write.

180 | Chapter 5: Replication

If fewer than the required w or r nodes are available, writes or reads return an error.

A node could be unavailable for many reasons: because the node is down (crashed,

powered down), due to an error executing the operation (can’t write because the disk

is full), due to a network interruption between the client and the node, or for any

number of other reasons. We only care whether the node returned a successful

response and don’t need to distinguish between different kinds of fault.

Limitations of Quorum Consistency

If you have n replicas, and you choose w and r such that w + r > n, you can generally expect every read to return the most recent value written for a key. This is the case because the set of nodes to which you’ve written and the set of nodes from which

you’ve read must overlap. That is, among the nodes you read there must be at least

one node with the latest value (illustrated in Figure 5-11).

Often, r and w are chosen to be a majority (more than n/2) of nodes, because that

ensures w + r > n while still tolerating up to n/2 node failures. But quorums are not necessarily majorities—it only matters that the sets of nodes used by the read and write operations overlap in at least one node. Other quorum assignments are possi‐

ble, which allows some flexibility in the design of distributed algorithms [45].

You may also set w and r to smaller numbers, so that w + r ≤ n (i.e., the quorum condition is not satisfied). In this case, reads and writes will still be sent to n nodes, but a smaller number of successful responses is required for the operation to succeed.

With a smaller w and r you are more likely to read stale values, because it’s more

likely that your read didn’t include the node with the latest value. On the upside, this

configuration allows lower latency and higher availability: if there is a network inter‐

ruption and many replicas become unreachable, there’s a higher chance that you can

continue processing reads and writes. Only after the number of reachable replicas

falls below w or r does the database become unavailable for writing or reading,

respectively.

However, even with w + r > n, there are likely to be edge cases where stale values are returned. These depend on the implementation, but possible scenarios include: • If a sloppy quorum is used (see “Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff” on page

183), the w writes may end up on different nodes than the r reads, so there is no longer a guaranteed overlap between the r nodes and the w nodes [46].

• If two writes occur concurrently, it is not clear which one happened first. In this

case, the only safe solution is to merge the concurrent writes (see “Handling

Write Conflicts” on page 171). If a winner is picked based on a timestamp (last

write wins), writes can be lost due to clock skew [35]. We will return to this topic

in “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184.

Leaderless Replication | 181

• If a write happens concurrently with a read, the write may be reflected on only

some of the replicas. In this case, it’s undetermined whether the read returns the

old or the new value.

• If a write succeeded on some replicas but failed on others (for example because

the disks on some nodes are full), and overall succeeded on fewer than w replicas,

it is not rolled back on the replicas where it succeeded. This means that if a write

was reported as failed, subsequent reads may or may not return the value from

that write [47].

• If a node carrying a new value fails, and its data is restored from a replica carry‐

ing an old value, the number of replicas storing the new value may fall below w,

breaking the quorum condition.

• Even if everything is working correctly, there are edge cases in which you can get

unlucky with the timing, as we shall see in “Linearizability and quorums” on

page 334.

Thus, although quorums appear to guarantee that a read returns the latest written

value, in practice it is not so simple. Dynamo-style databases are generally optimized

for use cases that can tolerate eventual consistency. The parameters w and r allow you

to adjust the probability of stale values being read, but it’s wise to not take them as

absolute guarantees.

In particular, you usually do not get the guarantees discussed in “Problems with Rep‐

lication Lag” on page 161 (reading your writes, monotonic reads, or consistent prefix

reads), so the previously mentioned anomalies can occur in applications. Stronger

guarantees generally require transactions or consensus. We will return to these topics

in Chapter 7 and Chapter 9.

Monitoring staleness

From an operational perspective, it’s important to monitor whether your databases

are returning up-to-date results. Even if your application can tolerate stale reads, you

need to be aware of the health of your replication. If it falls behind significantly, it

should alert you so that you can investigate the cause (for example, a problem in the

network or an overloaded node).

For leader-based replication, the database typically exposes metrics for the replication

lag, which you can feed into a monitoring system. This is possible because writes are

applied to the leader and to followers in the same order, and each node has a position

in the replication log (the number of writes it has applied locally). By subtracting a

follower’s current position from the leader’s current position, you can measure the

amount of replication lag.

However, in systems with leaderless replication, there is no fixed order in which

writes are applied, which makes monitoring more difficult. Moreover, if the database

182 | Chapter 5: Replication

only uses read repair (no anti-entropy), there is no limit to how old a value might be

—if a value is only infrequently read, the value returned by a stale replica may be

ancient.

There has been some research on measuring replica staleness in databases with lead‐

erless replication and predicting the expected percentage of stale reads depending on

the parameters n, w, and r [48]. This is unfortunately not yet common practice, but it would be good to include staleness measurements in the standard set of metrics for databases. Eventual consistency is a deliberately vague guarantee, but for operability

it’s important to be able to quantify “eventual.”

Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff

Databases with appropriately configured quorums can tolerate the failure of individ‐

ual nodes without the need for failover. They can also tolerate individual nodes going

slow, because requests don’t have to wait for all n nodes to respond—they can return

when w or r nodes have responded. These characteristics make databases with leader‐

less replication appealing for use cases that require high availability and low latency,

and that can tolerate occasional stale reads.

However, quorums (as described so far) are not as fault-tolerant as they could be. A

network interruption can easily cut off a client from a large number of database

nodes. Although those nodes are alive, and other clients may be able to connect to

them, to a client that is cut off from the database nodes, they might as well be dead. In

this situation, it’s likely that fewer than w or r reachable nodes remain, so the client

can no longer reach a quorum.

In a large cluster (with significantly more than n nodes) it’s likely that the client can

connect to some database nodes during the network interruption, just not to the

nodes that it needs to assemble a quorum for a particular value. In that case, database

designers face a trade-off:

• Is it better to return errors to all requests for which we cannot reach a quorum of

w or r nodes?

• Or should we accept writes anyway, and write them to some nodes that are

reachable but aren’t among the n nodes on which the value usually lives?

The latter is known as a sloppy quorum [37]: writes and reads still require w and r successful responses, but those may include nodes that are not among the designated n “home” nodes for a value. By analogy, if you lock yourself out of your house, you

may knock on the neighbor’s door and ask whether you may stay on their couch tem‐

porarily.

Once the network interruption is fixed, any writes that one node temporarily

accepted on behalf of another node are sent to the appropriate “home” nodes. This is

Leaderless Replication | 183

called hinted handoff. (Once you find the keys to your house again, your neighbor

politely asks you to get off their couch and go home.)

Sloppy quorums are particularly useful for increasing write availability: as long as any

w nodes are available, the database can accept writes. However, this means that even

when w + r > n, you cannot be sure to read the latest value for a key, because the latest value may have been temporarily written to some nodes outside of n [47].

Thus, a sloppy quorum actually isn’t a quorum at all in the traditional sense. It’s only

an assurance of durability, namely that the data is stored on w nodes somewhere.

There is no guarantee that a read of r nodes will see it until the hinted handoff has

completed.

Sloppy quorums are optional in all common Dynamo implementations. In Riak they

are enabled by default, and in Cassandra and Voldemort they are disabled by default

[46, 49, 50].

Multi-datacenter operation

We previously discussed cross-datacenter replication as a use case for multi-leader

replication (see “Multi-Leader Replication” on page 168). Leaderless replication is

also suitable for multi-datacenter operation, since it is designed to tolerate conflicting

concurrent writes, network interruptions, and latency spikes.

Cassandra and Voldemort implement their multi-datacenter support within the nor‐

mal leaderless model: the number of replicas n includes nodes in all datacenters, and

in the configuration you can specify how many of the n replicas you want to have in

each datacenter. Each write from a client is sent to all replicas, regardless of datacen‐

ter, but the client usually only waits for acknowledgment from a quorum of nodes

within its local datacenter so that it is unaffected by delays and interruptions on the

cross-datacenter link. The higher-latency writes to other datacenters are often config‐

ured to happen asynchronously, although there is some flexibility in the configura‐

tion [50, 51].

Riak keeps all communication between clients and database nodes local to one data‐

center, so n describes the number of replicas within one datacenter. Cross-datacenter

replication between database clusters happens asynchronously in the background, in

a style that is similar to multi-leader replication [52].

Detecting Concurrent Writes

Dynamo-style databases allow several clients to concurrently write to the same key,

which means that conflicts will occur even if strict quorums are used. The situation is

similar to multi-leader replication (see “Handling Write Conflicts” on page 171),

although in Dynamo-style databases conflicts can also arise during read repair or

hinted handoff.

184 | Chapter 5: Replication

The problem is that events may arrive in a different order at different nodes, due to

variable network delays and partial failures. For example, Figure 5-12 shows two cli‐

ents, A and B, simultaneously writing to a key X in a three-node datastore:

• Node 1 receives the write from A, but never receives the write from B due to a

transient outage.

• Node 2 first receives the write from A, then the write from B.

• Node 3 first receives the write from B, then the write from A.

Figure 5-12. Concurrent writes in a Dynamo-style datastore: there is no well-defined

ordering.

If each node simply overwrote the value for a key whenever it received a write request

from a client, the nodes would become permanently inconsistent, as shown by the

final get request in Figure 5-12: node 2 thinks that the final value of X is B, whereas the other nodes think that the value is A.

In order to become eventually consistent, the replicas should converge toward the

same value. How do they do that? One might hope that replicated databases would

handle this automatically, but unfortunately most implementations are quite poor: if

you want to avoid losing data, you—the application developer—need to know a lot

about the internals of your database’s conflict handling.

We briefly touched on some techniques for conflict resolution in “Handling Write

Conflicts” on page 171. Before we wrap up this chapter, let’s explore the issue in a bit more detail.

Leaderless Replication | 185

Last write wins (discarding concurrent writes)

One approach for achieving eventual convergence is to declare that each replica need

only store the most “recent” value and allow “older” values to be overwritten and dis‐

carded. Then, as long as we have some way of unambiguously determining which

write is more “recent,” and every write is eventually copied to every replica, the repli‐

cas will eventually converge to the same value.

As indicated by the quotes around “recent,” this idea is actually quite misleading. In

the example of Figure 5-12, neither client knew about the other one when it sent its

write requests to the database nodes, so it’s not clear which one happened first. In

fact, it doesn’t really make sense to say that either happened “first”: we say the writes

are concurrent, so their order is undefined.

Even though the writes don’t have a natural ordering, we can force an arbitrary order

on them. For example, we can attach a timestamp to each write, pick the biggest

timestamp as the most “recent,” and discard any writes with an earlier timestamp.

This conflict resolution algorithm, called last write wins (LWW), is the only sup‐

ported conflict resolution method in Cassandra [53], and an optional feature in Riak

[35].

LWW achieves the goal of eventual convergence, but at the cost of durability: if there

are several concurrent writes to the same key, even if they were all reported as suc‐

cessful to the client (because they were written to w replicas), only one of the writes

will survive and the others will be silently discarded. Moreover, LWW may even drop

writes that are not concurrent, as we shall discuss in “Timestamps for ordering

events” on page 291.

There are some situations, such as caching, in which lost writes are perhaps accepta‐

ble. If losing data is not acceptable, LWW is a poor choice for conflict resolution.

The only safe way of using a database with LWW is to ensure that a key is only writ‐

ten once and thereafter treated as immutable, thus avoiding any concurrent updates

to the same key. For example, a recommended way of using Cassandra is to use a

UUID as the key, thus giving each write operation a unique key [53].

The “happens-before” relationship and concurrency

How do we decide whether two operations are concurrent or not? To develop an

intuition, let’s look at some examples:

• In Figure 5-9, the two writes are not concurrent: A’s insert happens before B’s increment, because the value incremented by B is the value inserted by A. In other words, B’s operation builds upon A’s operation, so B’s operation must have

happened later. We also say that B is causally dependent on A.

186 | Chapter 5: Replication

• On the other hand, the two writes in Figure 5-12 are concurrent: when each client starts the operation, it does not know that another client is also performing an operation on the same key. Thus, there is no causal dependency between the

operations.

An operation A happens before another operation B if B knows about A, or depends

on A, or builds upon A in some way. Whether one operation happens before another

operation is the key to defining what concurrency means. In fact, we can simply say

that two operations are concurrent if neither happens before the other (i.e., neither

knows about the other) [54].

Thus, whenever you have two operations A and B, there are three possibilities: either

A happened before B, or B happened before A, or A and B are concurrent. What we

need is an algorithm to tell us whether two operations are concurrent or not. If one

operation happened before another, the later operation should overwrite the earlier

operation, but if the operations are concurrent, we have a conflict that needs to be

resolved.

Concurrency, Time, and Relativity

It may seem that two operations should be called concurrent if they occur “at the

same time”—but in fact, it is not important whether they literally overlap in time.

Because of problems with clocks in distributed systems, it is actually quite difficult to

tell whether two things happened at exactly the same time—an issue we will discuss

in more detail in Chapter 8.

For defining concurrency, exact time doesn’t matter: we simply call two operations

concurrent if they are both unaware of each other, regardless of the physical time at

which they occurred. People sometimes make a connection between this principle

and the special theory of relativity in physics [54], which introduced the idea that

information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Consequently, two events

that occur some distance apart cannot possibly affect each other if the time between

the events is shorter than the time it takes light to travel the distance between them.

In computer systems, two operations might be concurrent even though the speed of

light would in principle have allowed one operation to affect the other. For example,

if the network was slow or interrupted at the time, two operations can occur some

time apart and still be concurrent, because the network problems prevented one

operation from being able to know about the other.

Capturing the happens-before relationship

Let’s look at an algorithm that determines whether two operations are concurrent, or

whether one happened before another. To keep things simple, let’s start with a data‐

Leaderless Replication | 187

base that has only one replica. Once we have worked out how to do this on a single

replica, we can generalize the approach to a leaderless database with multiple replicas.

Figure 5-13 shows two clients concurrently adding items to the same shopping cart.

(If that example strikes you as too inane, imagine instead two air traffic controllers

concurrently adding aircraft to the sector they are tracking.) Initially, the cart is

empty. Between them, the clients make five writes to the database:

1. Client 1 adds milk to the cart. This is the first write to that key, so the server suc‐

cessfully stores it and assigns it version 1. The server also echoes the value back

to the client, along with the version number.

2. Client 2 adds eggs to the cart, not knowing that client 1 concurrently added milk

(client 2 thought that its eggs were the only item in the cart). The server assigns

version 2 to this write, and stores eggs and milk as two separate values. It then

returns both values to the client, along with the version number of 2.

3. Client 1, oblivious to client 2’s write, wants to add flour to the cart, so it thinks

the current cart contents should be [milk, flour]. It sends this value to the

server, along with the version number 1 that the server gave client 1 previously.

The server can tell from the version number that the write of [milk, flour]

supersedes the prior value of [milk] but that it is concurrent with [eggs]. Thus,

the server assigns version 3 to [milk, flour], overwrites the version 1 value

[milk], but keeps the version 2 value [eggs] and returns both remaining values

to the client.

4. Meanwhile, client 2 wants to add ham to the cart, unaware that client 1 just added

flour. Client 2 received the two values [milk] and [eggs] from the server in the

last response, so the client now merges those values and adds ham to form a new

value, [eggs, milk, ham]. It sends that value to the server, along with the previ‐

ous version number 2. The server detects that version 2 overwrites [eggs] but is

concurrent with [milk, flour], so the two remaining values are [milk, flour]

with version 3, and [eggs, milk, ham] with version 4.

5. Finally, client 1 wants to add bacon. It previously received [milk, flour] and

[eggs] from the server at version 3, so it merges those, adds bacon, and sends the

final value [milk, flour, eggs, bacon] to the server, along with the version

number 3. This overwrites [milk, flour] (note that [eggs] was already over‐

written in the last step) but is concurrent with [eggs, milk, ham], so the server

keeps those two concurrent values.

188 | Chapter 5: Replication

Figure 5-13. Capturing causal dependencies between two clients concurrently editing a

shopping cart.

The dataflow between the operations in Figure 5-13 is illustrated graphically in

Figure 5-14. The arrows indicate which operation happened before which other operation, in the sense that the later operation knew about or depended on the earlier one.

In this example, the clients are never fully up to date with the data on the server, since

there is always another operation going on concurrently. But old versions of the value

do get overwritten eventually, and no writes are lost.

Figure 5-14. Graph of causal dependencies in Figure 5-13 .

Note that the server can determine whether two operations are concurrent by looking

at the version numbers—it does not need to interpret the value itself (so the value

could be any data structure). The algorithm works as follows:

Leaderless Replication | 189

• The server maintains a version number for every key, increments the version

number every time that key is written, and stores the new version number along

with the value written.

• When a client reads a key, the server returns all values that have not been over‐

written, as well as the latest version number. A client must read a key before

writing.

• When a client writes a key, it must include the version number from the prior

read, and it must merge together all values that it received in the prior read. (The

response from a write request can be like a read, returning all current values,

which allows us to chain several writes like in the shopping cart example.)

• When the server receives a write with a particular version number, it can over‐

write all values with that version number or below (since it knows that they have

been merged into the new value), but it must keep all values with a higher ver‐

sion number (because those values are concurrent with the incoming write).

When a write includes the version number from a prior read, that tells us which pre‐

vious state the write is based on. If you make a write without including a version

number, it is concurrent with all other writes, so it will not overwrite anything—it

will just be returned as one of the values on subsequent reads.

Merging concurrently written values

This algorithm ensures that no data is silently dropped, but it unfortunately requires

that the clients do some extra work: if several operations happen concurrently, clients

have to clean up afterward by merging the concurrently written values. Riak calls

these concurrent values siblings.

Merging sibling values is essentially the same problem as conflict resolution in multi-

leader replication, which we discussed previously (see “Handling Write Conflicts” on

page 171). A simple approach is to just pick one of the values based on a version

number or timestamp (last write wins), but that implies losing data. So, you may

need to do something more intelligent in application code.

With the example of a shopping cart, a reasonable approach to merging siblings is to

just take the union. In Figure 5-14, the two final siblings are [milk, flour, eggs,

bacon] and [eggs, milk, ham]; note that milk and eggs appear in both, even

though they were each only written once. The merged value might be something like

[milk, flour, eggs, bacon, ham], without duplicates.

However, if you want to allow people to also remove things from their carts, and not

just add things, then taking the union of siblings may not yield the right result: if you

merge two sibling carts and an item has been removed in only one of them, then the

removed item will reappear in the union of the siblings [37]. To prevent this prob‐

190 | Chapter 5: Replication

lem, an item cannot simply be deleted from the database when it is removed; instead,

the system must leave a marker with an appropriate version number to indicate that

the item has been removed when merging siblings. Such a deletion marker is known

as a tombstone. (We previously saw tombstones in the context of log compaction in

“Hash Indexes” on page 72.)

As merging siblings in application code is complex and error-prone, there are some

efforts to design data structures that can perform this merging automatically, as dis‐

cussed in “Automatic Conflict Resolution” on page 174. For example, Riak’s datatype

support uses a family of data structures called CRDTs [38, 39, 55] that can automati‐

cally merge siblings in sensible ways, including preserving deletions.

Version vectors

The example in Figure 5-13 used only a single replica. How does the algorithm

change when there are multiple replicas, but no leader?

Figure 5-13 uses a single version number to capture dependencies between opera‐

tions, but that is not sufficient when there are multiple replicas accepting writes con‐

currently. Instead, we need to use a version number per replica as well as per key.

Each replica increments its own version number when processing a write, and also

keeps track of the version numbers it has seen from each of the other replicas. This

information indicates which values to overwrite and which values to keep as siblings.

The collection of version numbers from all the replicas is called a version vector [56].

A few variants of this idea are in use, but the most interesting is probably the dotted

version vector [57], which is used in Riak 2.0 [58, 59]. We won’t go into the details, but the way it works is quite similar to what we saw in our cart example.

Like the version numbers in Figure 5-13, version vectors are sent from the database

replicas to clients when values are read, and need to be sent back to the database

when a value is subsequently written. (Riak encodes the version vector as a string that

it calls causal context.) The version vector allows the database to distinguish between

overwrites and concurrent writes.

Also, like in the single-replica example, the application may need to merge siblings.

The version vector structure ensures that it is safe to read from one replica and subse‐

quently write back to another replica. Doing so may result in siblings being created,

but no data is lost as long as siblings are merged correctly.

Version vectors and vector clocks

A version vector is sometimes also called a vector clock, even though

they are not quite the same. The difference is subtle—please see the

references for details [57, 60, 61]. In brief, when comparing the

state of replicas, version vectors are the right data structure to use.

Leaderless Replication | 191

Summary

In this chapter we looked at the issue of replication. Replication can serve several

purposes:

High availability

Keeping the system running, even when one machine (or several machines, or an

entire datacenter) goes down

Disconnected operation

Allowing an application to continue working when there is a network interrup‐

tion

Latency

Placing data geographically close to users, so that users can interact with it faster

Scalability

Being able to handle a higher volume of reads than a single machine could han‐

dle, by performing reads on replicas

Despite being a simple goal—keeping a copy of the same data on several machines—

replication turns out to be a remarkably tricky problem. It requires carefully thinking

about concurrency and about all the things that can go wrong, and dealing with the

consequences of those faults. At a minimum, we need to deal with unavailable nodes

and network interruptions (and that’s not even considering the more insidious kinds

of fault, such as silent data corruption due to software bugs).

We discussed three main approaches to replication:

Single-leader replication

Clients send all writes to a single node (the leader), which sends a stream of data

change events to the other replicas (followers). Reads can be performed on any

replica, but reads from followers might be stale.

Multi-leader replication

Clients send each write to one of several leader nodes, any of which can accept

writes. The leaders send streams of data change events to each other and to any

follower nodes.

Leaderless replication

Clients send each write to several nodes, and read from several nodes in parallel

in order to detect and correct nodes with stale data.

Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Single-leader replication is popular

because it is fairly easy to understand and there is no conflict resolution to worry

about. Multi-leader and leaderless replication can be more robust in the presence of

192 | Chapter 5: Replication

faulty nodes, network interruptions, and latency spikes—at the cost of being harder

to reason about and providing only very weak consistency guarantees.

Replication can be synchronous or asynchronous, which has a profound effect on the

system behavior when there is a fault. Although asynchronous replication can be fast

when the system is running smoothly, it’s important to figure out what happens

when replication lag increases and servers fail. If a leader fails and you promote an

asynchronously updated follower to be the new leader, recently committed data may

be lost.

We looked at some strange effects that can be caused by replication lag, and we dis‐

cussed a few consistency models which are helpful for deciding how an application

should behave under replication lag:

Read-after-write consistency

Users should always see data that they submitted themselves.

Monotonic reads

After users have seen the data at one point in time, they shouldn’t later see the

data from some earlier point in time.

Consistent prefix reads

Users should see the data in a state that makes causal sense: for example, seeing a

question and its reply in the correct order.

Finally, we discussed the concurrency issues that are inherent in multi-leader and

leaderless replication approaches: because they allow multiple writes to happen con‐

currently, conflicts may occur. We examined an algorithm that a database might use

to determine whether one operation happened before another, or whether they hap‐

pened concurrently. We also touched on methods for resolving conflicts by merging

together concurrent updates.

In the next chapter we will continue looking at data that is distributed across multiple

machines, through the counterpart of replication: splitting a large dataset into parti‐

tions.

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Summary | 197

CHAPTER 6

Partitioning

Clearly, we must break away from the sequential and not limit the computers. We must

state definitions and provide for priorities and descriptions of data. We must state relation‐

ships, not procedures.

—Grace Murray Hopper, Management and the Computer of the Future (1962)

In Chapter 5 we discussed replication—that is, having multiple copies of the same

data on different nodes. For very large datasets, or very high query throughput, that is

not sufficient: we need to break the data up into partitions, also known as sharding.i

Terminological confusion

What we call a partition here is called a shard in MongoDB, Elas‐

ticsearch, and SolrCloud; it’s known as a region in HBase, a tablet

in Bigtable, a vnode in Cassandra and Riak, and a vBucket in

Couchbase. However, partitioning is the most established term, so

we’ll stick with that.

Normally, partitions are defined in such a way that each piece of data (each record,

row, or document) belongs to exactly one partition. There are various ways of achiev‐

ing this, which we discuss in depth in this chapter. In effect, each partition is a small

database of its own, although the database may support operations that touch multi‐

ple partitions at the same time.

The main reason for wanting to partition data is scalability. Different partitions can

be placed on different nodes in a shared-nothing cluster (see the introduction to

i. Partitioning, as discussed in this chapter, is a way of intentionally breaking a large database down into smaller ones. It has nothing to do with network partitions (netsplits), a type of fault in the network between nodes. We will discuss such faults in Chapter 8.

199

Part II for a definition of shared nothing). Thus, a large dataset can be distributed across many disks, and the query load can be distributed across many processors.

For queries that operate on a single partition, each node can independently execute

the queries for its own partition, so query throughput can be scaled by adding more

nodes. Large, complex queries can potentially be parallelized across many nodes,

although this gets significantly harder.

Partitioned databases were pioneered in the 1980s by products such as Teradata and

Tandem NonStop SQL [1], and more recently rediscovered by NoSQL databases and

Hadoop-based data warehouses. Some systems are designed for transactional work‐

loads, and others for analytics (see “Transaction Processing or Analytics?” on page

90): this difference affects how the system is tuned, but the fundamentals of partitioning apply to both kinds of workloads.

In this chapter we will first look at different approaches for partitioning large datasets

and observe how the indexing of data interacts with partitioning. We’ll then talk

about rebalancing, which is necessary if you want to add or remove nodes in your

cluster. Finally, we’ll get an overview of how databases route requests to the right par‐

titions and execute queries.

Partitioning and Replication

Partitioning is usually combined with replication so that copies of each partition are

stored on multiple nodes. This means that, even though each record belongs to

exactly one partition, it may still be stored on several different nodes for fault toler‐

ance.

A node may store more than one partition. If a leader–follower replication model is

used, the combination of partitioning and replication can look like Figure 6-1. Each

partition’s leader is assigned to one node, and its followers are assigned to other

nodes. Each node may be the leader for some partitions and a follower for other par‐

titions.

Everything we discussed in Chapter 5 about replication of databases applies equally

to replication of partitions. The choice of partitioning scheme is mostly independent

of the choice of replication scheme, so we will keep things simple and ignore replica‐

tion in this chapter.

200 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

Figure 6-1. Combining replication and partitioning: each node acts as leader for some

partitions and follower for other partitions.

Partitioning of Key-Value Data

Say you have a large amount of data, and you want to partition it. How do you decide

which records to store on which nodes?

Our goal with partitioning is to spread the data and the query load evenly across

nodes. If every node takes a fair share, then—in theory—10 nodes should be able to

handle 10 times as much data and 10 times the read and write throughput of a single

node (ignoring replication for now).

If the partitioning is unfair, so that some partitions have more data or queries than

others, we call it skewed. The presence of skew makes partitioning much less effective.

In an extreme case, all the load could end up on one partition, so 9 out of 10 nodes

are idle and your bottleneck is the single busy node. A partition with disproportion‐

ately high load is called a hot spot.

The simplest approach for avoiding hot spots would be to assign records to nodes

randomly. That would distribute the data quite evenly across the nodes, but it has a

big disadvantage: when you’re trying to read a particular item, you have no way of

knowing which node it is on, so you have to query all nodes in parallel.

We can do better. Let’s assume for now that you have a simple key-value data model,

in which you always access a record by its primary key. For example, in an old-

fashioned paper encyclopedia, you look up an entry by its title; since all the entries

are alphabetically sorted by title, you can quickly find the one you’re looking for.

Partitioning of Key-Value Data | 201

Partitioning by Key Range

One way of partitioning is to assign a continuous range of keys (from some mini‐

mum to some maximum) to each partition, like the volumes of a paper encyclopedia

(Figure 6-2). If you know the boundaries between the ranges, you can easily deter‐

mine which partition contains a given key. If you also know which partition is

assigned to which node, then you can make your request directly to the appropriate

node (or, in the case of the encyclopedia, pick the correct book off the shelf).

Figure 6-2. A print encyclopedia is partitioned by key range.

The ranges of keys are not necessarily evenly spaced, because your data may not be

evenly distributed. For example, in Figure 6-2, volume 1 contains words starting with

A and B, but volume 12 contains words starting with T, U, V, X, Y, and Z. Simply

having one volume per two letters of the alphabet would lead to some volumes being

much bigger than others. In order to distribute the data evenly, the partition bound‐

aries need to adapt to the data.

The partition boundaries might be chosen manually by an administrator, or the data‐

base can choose them automatically (we will discuss choices of partition boundaries

in more detail in “Rebalancing Partitions” on page 209). This partitioning strategy is

used by Bigtable, its open source equivalent HBase [2, 3], RethinkDB, and MongoDB

before version 2.4 [4].

Within each partition, we can keep keys in sorted order (see “SSTables and LSM-

Trees” on page 76). This has the advantage that range scans are easy, and you can

treat the key as a concatenated index in order to fetch several related records in one

query (see “Multi-column indexes” on page 87). For example, consider an application

that stores data from a network of sensors, where the key is the timestamp of the

measurement ( year-month-day-hour-minute-second). Range scans are very useful in

this case, because they let you easily fetch, say, all the readings from a particular

month.

202 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

However, the downside of key range partitioning is that certain access patterns can

lead to hot spots. If the key is a timestamp, then the partitions correspond to ranges

of time—e.g., one partition per day. Unfortunately, because we write data from the

sensors to the database as the measurements happen, all the writes end up going to

the same partition (the one for today), so that partition can be overloaded with writes

while others sit idle [5].

To avoid this problem in the sensor database, you need to use something other than

the timestamp as the first element of the key. For example, you could prefix each

timestamp with the sensor name so that the partitioning is first by sensor name and

then by time. Assuming you have many sensors active at the same time, the write

load will end up more evenly spread across the partitions. Now, when you want to

fetch the values of multiple sensors within a time range, you need to perform a sepa‐

rate range query for each sensor name.

Partitioning by Hash of Key

Because of this risk of skew and hot spots, many distributed datastores use a hash

function to determine the partition for a given key.

A good hash function takes skewed data and makes it uniformly distributed. Say you

have a 32-bit hash function that takes a string. Whenever you give it a new string, it

returns a seemingly random number between 0 and 232 − 1. Even if the input strings

are very similar, their hashes are evenly distributed across that range of numbers.

For partitioning purposes, the hash function need not be cryptographically strong:

for example, Cassandra and MongoDB use MD5, and Voldemort uses the Fowler–

Noll–Vo function. Many programming languages have simple hash functions built in

(as they are used for hash tables), but they may not be suitable for partitioning: for

example, in Java’s Object.hashCode() and Ruby’s Object#hash, the same key may

have a different hash value in different processes [6].

Once you have a suitable hash function for keys, you can assign each partition a

range of hashes (rather than a range of keys), and every key whose hash falls within a

partition’s range will be stored in that partition. This is illustrated in Figure 6-3.

Partitioning of Key-Value Data | 203

Figure 6-3. Partitioning by hash of key.

This technique is good at distributing keys fairly among the partitions. The partition

boundaries can be evenly spaced, or they can be chosen pseudorandomly (in which

case the technique is sometimes known as consistent hashing).

Consistent Hashing

Consistent hashing, as defined by Karger et al. [7], is a way of evenly distributing load

across an internet-wide system of caches such as a content delivery network (CDN).

It uses randomly chosen partition boundaries to avoid the need for central control or

distributed consensus. Note that consistent here has nothing to do with replica consis‐

tency (see Chapter 5) or ACID consistency (see Chapter 7), but rather describes a particular approach to rebalancing.

As we shall see in “Rebalancing Partitions” on page 209, this particular approach

actually doesn’t work very well for databases [8], so it is rarely used in practice (the

documentation of some databases still refers to consistent hashing, but it is often

inaccurate). Because this is so confusing, it’s best to avoid the term consistent hashing

and just call it hash partitioning instead.

Unfortunately however, by using the hash of the key for partitioning we lose a nice

property of key-range partitioning: the ability to do efficient range queries. Keys that

were once adjacent are now scattered across all the partitions, so their sort order is

lost. In MongoDB, if you have enabled hash-based sharding mode, any range query

has to be sent to all partitions [4]. Range queries on the primary key are not sup‐

ported by Riak [9], Couchbase [10], or Voldemort.

Cassandra achieves a compromise between the two partitioning strategies [11, 12,

13]. A table in Cassandra can be declared with a compound primary key consisting of several columns. Only the first part of that key is hashed to determine the partition, but the other columns are used as a concatenated index for sorting the data in Cas‐

sandra’s SSTables. A query therefore cannot search for a range of values within the

204 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

first column of a compound key, but if it specifies a fixed value for the first column, it can perform an efficient range scan over the other columns of the key.

The concatenated index approach enables an elegant data model for one-to-many

relationships. For example, on a social media site, one user may post many updates. If

the primary key for updates is chosen to be (user_id, update_timestamp), then you

can efficiently retrieve all updates made by a particular user within some time inter‐

val, sorted by timestamp. Different users may be stored on different partitions, but

within each user, the updates are stored ordered by timestamp on a single partition.

Skewed Workloads and Relieving Hot Spots

As discussed, hashing a key to determine its partition can help reduce hot spots.

However, it can’t avoid them entirely: in the extreme case where all reads and writes

are for the same key, you still end up with all requests being routed to the same parti‐

tion.

This kind of workload is perhaps unusual, but not unheard of: for example, on a

social media site, a celebrity user with millions of followers may cause a storm of

activity when they do something [14]. This event can result in a large volume of

writes to the same key (where the key is perhaps the user ID of the celebrity, or the ID

of the action that people are commenting on). Hashing the key doesn’t help, as the

hash of two identical IDs is still the same.

Today, most data systems are not able to automatically compensate for such a highly

skewed workload, so it’s the responsibility of the application to reduce the skew. For

example, if one key is known to be very hot, a simple technique is to add a random

number to the beginning or end of the key. Just a two-digit decimal random number

would split the writes to the key evenly across 100 different keys, allowing those keys

to be distributed to different partitions.

However, having split the writes across different keys, any reads now have to do addi‐

tional work, as they have to read the data from all 100 keys and combine it. This tech‐

nique also requires additional bookkeeping: it only makes sense to append the

random number for the small number of hot keys; for the vast majority of keys with

low write throughput this would be unnecessary overhead. Thus, you also need some

way of keeping track of which keys are being split.

Perhaps in the future, data systems will be able to automatically detect and compen‐

sate for skewed workloads; but for now, you need to think through the trade-offs for

your own application.

Partitioning of Key-Value Data | 205

Partitioning and Secondary Indexes

The partitioning schemes we have discussed so far rely on a key-value data model. If

records are only ever accessed via their primary key, we can determine the partition

from that key and use it to route read and write requests to the partition responsible

for that key.

The situation becomes more complicated if secondary indexes are involved (see also

“Other Indexing Structures” on page 85). A secondary index usually doesn’t identify

a record uniquely but rather is a way of searching for occurrences of a particular

value: find all actions by user 123, find all articles containing the word hogwash, find

all cars whose color is red, and so on.

Secondary indexes are the bread and butter of relational databases, and they are com‐

mon in document databases too. Many key-value stores (such as HBase and Volde‐

mort) have avoided secondary indexes because of their added implementation

complexity, but some (such as Riak) have started adding them because they are so

useful for data modeling. And finally, secondary indexes are the raison d’être of

search servers such as Solr and Elasticsearch.

The problem with secondary indexes is that they don’t map neatly to partitions.

There are two main approaches to partitioning a database with secondary indexes:

document-based partitioning and term-based partitioning.

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Document

For example, imagine you are operating a website for selling used cars (illustrated in

Figure 6-4). Each listing has a unique ID—call it the document ID—and you partition the database by the document ID (for example, IDs 0 to 499 in partition 0, IDs 500 to 999 in partition 1, etc.).

You want to let users search for cars, allowing them to filter by color and by make, so

you need a secondary index on color and make (in a document database these would

be fields; in a relational database they would be columns). If you have declared the

index, the database can perform the indexing automatically.ii For example, whenever

a red car is added to the database, the database partition automatically adds it to the

list of document IDs for the index entry color:red.

ii. If your database only supports a key-value model, you might be tempted to implement a secondary index

yourself by creating a mapping from values to document IDs in application code. If you go down this route,

you need to take great care to ensure your indexes remain consistent with the underlying data. Race condi‐

tions and intermittent write failures (where some changes were saved but others weren’t) can very easily cause

the data to go out of sync—see “The need for multi-object transactions” on page 231.

206 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

Figure 6-4. Partitioning secondary indexes by document.

In this indexing approach, each partition is completely separate: each partition main‐

tains its own secondary indexes, covering only the documents in that partition. It

doesn’t care what data is stored in other partitions. Whenever you need to write to

the database—to add, remove, or update a document—you only need to deal with the

partition that contains the document ID that you are writing. For that reason, a

document-partitioned index is also known as a local index (as opposed to a global

index, described in the next section).

However, reading from a document-partitioned index requires care: unless you have

done something special with the document IDs, there is no reason why all the cars

with a particular color or a particular make would be in the same partition. In

Figure 6-4, red cars appear in both partition 0 and partition 1. Thus, if you want to

search for red cars, you need to send the query to all partitions, and combine all the

results you get back.

This approach to querying a partitioned database is sometimes known as scatter/

gather, and it can make read queries on secondary indexes quite expensive. Even if

you query the partitions in parallel, scatter/gather is prone to tail latency amplifica‐

tion (see “Percentiles in Practice” on page 16). Nevertheless, it is widely used: Mon‐

goDB, Riak [15], Cassandra [16], Elasticsearch [17], SolrCloud [18], and VoltDB [19]

all use document-partitioned secondary indexes. Most database vendors recommend

that you structure your partitioning scheme so that secondary index queries can be

served from a single partition, but that is not always possible, especially when you’re

using multiple secondary indexes in a single query (such as filtering cars by color and

by make at the same time).

Partitioning and Secondary Indexes | 207

Figure 6-5. Partitioning secondary indexes by term.

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Term

Rather than each partition having its own secondary index (a local index), we can

construct a global index that covers data in all partitions. However, we can’t just store

that index on one node, since it would likely become a bottleneck and defeat the pur‐

pose of partitioning. A global index must also be partitioned, but it can be partitioned

differently from the primary key index.

Figure 6-5 illustrates what this could look like: red cars from all partitions appear

under color:red in the index, but the index is partitioned so that colors starting with

the letters a to r appear in partition 0 and colors starting with s to z appear in partition 1. The index on the make of car is partitioned similarly (with the partition boundary being between f and h).

We call this kind of index term-partitioned, because the term we’re looking for deter‐

mines the partition of the index. Here, a term would be color:red, for example. The

name term comes from full-text indexes (a particular kind of secondary index), where

the terms are all the words that occur in a document.

As before, we can partition the index by the term itself, or using a hash of the term.

Partitioning by the term itself can be useful for range scans (e.g., on a numeric prop‐

erty, such as the asking price of the car), whereas partitioning on a hash of the term

gives a more even distribution of load.

The advantage of a global (term-partitioned) index over a document-partitioned

index is that it can make reads more efficient: rather than doing scatter/gather over

all partitions, a client only needs to make a request to the partition containing the

term that it wants. However, the downside of a global index is that writes are slower

and more complicated, because a write to a single document may now affect multiple

208 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

partitions of the index (every term in the document might be on a different partition,

on a different node).

In an ideal world, the index would always be up to date, and every document written

to the database would immediately be reflected in the index. However, in a term-

partitioned index, that would require a distributed transaction across all partitions

affected by a write, which is not supported in all databases (see Chapter 7 and Chap‐

ter 9).

In practice, updates to global secondary indexes are often asynchronous (that is, if

you read the index shortly after a write, the change you just made may not yet be

reflected in the index). For example, Amazon DynamoDB states that its global secon‐

dary indexes are updated within a fraction of a second in normal circumstances, but

may experience longer propagation delays in cases of faults in the infrastructure [20].

Other uses of global term-partitioned indexes include Riak’s search feature [21] and

the Oracle data warehouse, which lets you choose between local and global indexing

[22]. We will return to the topic of implementing term-partitioned secondary indexes

in Chapter 12.

Rebalancing Partitions

Over time, things change in a database:

• The query throughput increases, so you want to add more CPUs to handle the

load.

• The dataset size increases, so you want to add more disks and RAM to store it.

• A machine fails, and other machines need to take over the failed machine’s

responsibilities.

All of these changes call for data and requests to be moved from one node to another.

The process of moving load from one node in the cluster to another is called reba‐

lancing.

No matter which partitioning scheme is used, rebalancing is usually expected to meet

some minimum requirements:

• After rebalancing, the load (data storage, read and write requests) should be

shared fairly between the nodes in the cluster.

• While rebalancing is happening, the database should continue accepting reads

and writes.

• No more data than necessary should be moved between nodes, to make rebalanc‐

ing fast and to minimize the network and disk I/O load.

Rebalancing Partitions | 209

Strategies for Rebalancing

There are a few different ways of assigning partitions to nodes [23]. Let’s briefly dis‐

cuss each in turn.

How not to do it: hash mod N

When partitioning by the hash of a key, we said earlier (Figure 6-3) that it’s best to

divide the possible hashes into ranges and assign each range to a partition (e.g., assign

key to partition 0 if 0 ≤ hash( key) < b 0, to partition 1 if b 0 ≤ hash( key) < b 1, etc.).

Perhaps you wondered why we don’t just use mod (the % operator in many program‐

ming languages). For example, hash( key) mod 10 would return a number between 0

and 9 (if we write the hash as a decimal number, the hash mod 10 would be the last

digit). If we have 10 nodes, numbered 0 to 9, that seems like an easy way of assigning

each key to a node.

The problem with the mod N approach is that if the number of nodes N changes,

most of the keys will need to be moved from one node to another. For example, say

hash( key) = 123456. If you initially have 10 nodes, that key starts out on node 6

(because 123456 mod 10 = 6). When you grow to 11 nodes, the key needs to move to

node 3 (123456 mod 11 = 3), and when you grow to 12 nodes, it needs to move to

node 0 (123456 mod 12 = 0). Such frequent moves make rebalancing excessively

expensive.

We need an approach that doesn’t move data around more than necessary.

Fixed number of partitions

Fortunately, there is a fairly simple solution: create many more partitions than there

are nodes, and assign several partitions to each node. For example, a database run‐

ning on a cluster of 10 nodes may be split into 1,000 partitions from the outset so that

approximately 100 partitions are assigned to each node.

Now, if a node is added to the cluster, the new node can steal a few partitions from

every existing node until partitions are fairly distributed once again. This process is

illustrated in Figure 6-6. If a node is removed from the cluster, the same happens in

reverse.

Only entire partitions are moved between nodes. The number of partitions does not

change, nor does the assignment of keys to partitions. The only thing that changes is

the assignment of partitions to nodes. This change of assignment is not immediate—

it takes some time to transfer a large amount of data over the network—so the old

assignment of partitions is used for any reads and writes that happen while the trans‐

fer is in progress.

210 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

Figure 6-6. Adding a new node to a database cluster with multiple partitions per node.

In principle, you can even account for mismatched hardware in your cluster: by

assigning more partitions to nodes that are more powerful, you can force those nodes

to take a greater share of the load.

This approach to rebalancing is used in Riak [15], Elasticsearch [24], Couchbase [10],

and Voldemort [25].

In this configuration, the number of partitions is usually fixed when the database is

first set up and not changed afterward. Although in principle it’s possible to split and

merge partitions (see the next section), a fixed number of partitions is operationally

simpler, and so many fixed-partition databases choose not to implement partition

splitting. Thus, the number of partitions configured at the outset is the maximum

number of nodes you can have, so you need to choose it high enough to accommo‐

date future growth. However, each partition also has management overhead, so it’s

counterproductive to choose too high a number.

Choosing the right number of partitions is difficult if the total size of the dataset is

highly variable (for example, if it starts small but may grow much larger over time).

Since each partition contains a fixed fraction of the total data, the size of each parti‐

tion grows proportionally to the total amount of data in the cluster. If partitions are

very large, rebalancing and recovery from node failures become expensive. But if par‐

titions are too small, they incur too much overhead. The best performance is

achieved when the size of partitions is “just right,” neither too big nor too small,

which can be hard to achieve if the number of partitions is fixed but the dataset size

varies.

Rebalancing Partitions | 211

Dynamic partitioning

For databases that use key range partitioning (see “Partitioning by Key Range” on

page 202), a fixed number of partitions with fixed boundaries would be very incon‐

venient: if you got the boundaries wrong, you could end up with all of the data in one

partition and all of the other partitions empty. Reconfiguring the partition bound‐

aries manually would be very tedious.

For that reason, key range–partitioned databases such as HBase and RethinkDB cre‐

ate partitions dynamically. When a partition grows to exceed a configured size (on

HBase, the default is 10 GB), it is split into two partitions so that approximately half

of the data ends up on each side of the split [26]. Conversely, if lots of data is deleted and a partition shrinks below some threshold, it can be merged with an adjacent partition. This process is similar to what happens at the top level of a B-tree (see “B-

Trees” on page 79).

Each partition is assigned to one node, and each node can handle multiple partitions,

like in the case of a fixed number of partitions. After a large partition has been split,

one of its two halves can be transferred to another node in order to balance the load.

In the case of HBase, the transfer of partition files happens through HDFS, the

underlying distributed filesystem [3].

An advantage of dynamic partitioning is that the number of partitions adapts to the

total data volume. If there is only a small amount of data, a small number of parti‐

tions is sufficient, so overheads are small; if there is a huge amount of data, the size of

each individual partition is limited to a configurable maximum [23].

However, a caveat is that an empty database starts off with a single partition, since

there is no a priori information about where to draw the partition boundaries. While

the dataset is small—until it hits the point at which the first partition is split—all

writes have to be processed by a single node while the other nodes sit idle. To miti‐

gate this issue, HBase and MongoDB allow an initial set of partitions to be configured

on an empty database (this is called pre-splitting). In the case of key-range partition‐

ing, pre-splitting requires that you already know what the key distribution is going to

look like [4, 26].

Dynamic partitioning is not only suitable for key range–partitioned data, but can

equally well be used with hash-partitioned data. MongoDB since version 2.4 supports

both key-range and hash partitioning, and it splits partitions dynamically in either

case.

Partitioning proportionally to nodes

With dynamic partitioning, the number of partitions is proportional to the size of the

dataset, since the splitting and merging processes keep the size of each partition

between some fixed minimum and maximum. On the other hand, with a fixed num‐

212 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

ber of partitions, the size of each partition is proportional to the size of the dataset. In both of these cases, the number of partitions is independent of the number of nodes.

A third option, used by Cassandra and Ketama, is to make the number of partitions

proportional to the number of nodes—in other words, to have a fixed number of par‐

titions per node [23, 27, 28]. In this case, the size of each partition grows proportionally to the dataset size while the number of nodes remains unchanged, but when you increase the number of nodes, the partitions become smaller again. Since a larger

data volume generally requires a larger number of nodes to store, this approach also

keeps the size of each partition fairly stable.

When a new node joins the cluster, it randomly chooses a fixed number of existing

partitions to split, and then takes ownership of one half of each of those split parti‐

tions while leaving the other half of each partition in place. The randomization can

produce unfair splits, but when averaged over a larger number of partitions (in Cas‐

sandra, 256 partitions per node by default), the new node ends up taking a fair share

of the load from the existing nodes. Cassandra 3.0 introduced an alternative rebalanc‐

ing algorithm that avoids unfair splits [29].

Picking partition boundaries randomly requires that hash-based partitioning is used

(so the boundaries can be picked from the range of numbers produced by the hash

function). Indeed, this approach corresponds most closely to the original definition

of consistent hashing [7] (see “Consistent Hashing” on page 204). Newer hash functions can achieve a similar effect with lower metadata overhead [8].

Operations: Automatic or Manual Rebalancing

There is one important question with regard to rebalancing that we have glossed

over: does the rebalancing happen automatically or manually?

There is a gradient between fully automatic rebalancing (the system decides automat‐

ically when to move partitions from one node to another, without any administrator

interaction) and fully manual (the assignment of partitions to nodes is explicitly con‐

figured by an administrator, and only changes when the administrator explicitly

reconfigures it). For example, Couchbase, Riak, and Voldemort generate a suggested

partition assignment automatically, but require an administrator to commit it before

it takes effect.

Fully automated rebalancing can be convenient, because there is less operational

work to do for normal maintenance. However, it can be unpredictable. Rebalancing

is an expensive operation, because it requires rerouting requests and moving a large

amount of data from one node to another. If it is not done carefully, this process can

overload the network or the nodes and harm the performance of other requests while

the rebalancing is in progress.

Rebalancing Partitions | 213

Such automation can be dangerous in combination with automatic failure detection.

For example, say one node is overloaded and is temporarily slow to respond to

requests. The other nodes conclude that the overloaded node is dead, and automati‐

cally rebalance the cluster to move load away from it. This puts additional load on the

overloaded node, other nodes, and the network—making the situation worse and

potentially causing a cascading failure.

For that reason, it can be a good thing to have a human in the loop for rebalancing.

It’s slower than a fully automatic process, but it can help prevent operational

surprises.

Request Routing

We have now partitioned our dataset across multiple nodes running on multiple

machines. But there remains an open question: when a client wants to make a

request, how does it know which node to connect to? As partitions are rebalanced,

the assignment of partitions to nodes changes. Somebody needs to stay on top of

those changes in order to answer the question: if I want to read or write the key “foo”,

which IP address and port number do I need to connect to?

This is an instance of a more general problem called service discovery, which isn’t

limited to just databases. Any piece of software that is accessible over a network has

this problem, especially if it is aiming for high availability (running in a redundant

configuration on multiple machines). Many companies have written their own in-

house service discovery tools, and many of these have been released as open source

[30].

On a high level, there are a few different approaches to this problem (illustrated in

Figure 6-7):

1. Allow clients to contact any node (e.g., via a round-robin load balancer). If that

node coincidentally owns the partition to which the request applies, it can handle

the request directly; otherwise, it forwards the request to the appropriate node,

receives the reply, and passes the reply along to the client.

2. Send all requests from clients to a routing tier first, which determines the node

that should handle each request and forwards it accordingly. This routing tier

does not itself handle any requests; it only acts as a partition-aware load balancer.

3. Require that clients be aware of the partitioning and the assignment of partitions

to nodes. In this case, a client can connect directly to the appropriate node,

without any intermediary.

In all cases, the key problem is: how does the component making the routing decision

(which may be one of the nodes, or the routing tier, or the client) learn about changes

in the assignment of partitions to nodes?

214 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

Figure 6-7. Three different ways of routing a request to the right node.

This is a challenging problem, because it is important that all participants agree—

otherwise requests would be sent to the wrong nodes and not handled correctly.

There are protocols for achieving consensus in a distributed system, but they are hard

to implement correctly (see Chapter 9).

Many distributed data systems rely on a separate coordination service such as Zoo‐

Keeper to keep track of this cluster metadata, as illustrated in Figure 6-8. Each node

registers itself in ZooKeeper, and ZooKeeper maintains the authoritative mapping of

partitions to nodes. Other actors, such as the routing tier or the partitioning-aware

client, can subscribe to this information in ZooKeeper. Whenever a partition changes

ownership, or a node is added or removed, ZooKeeper notifies the routing tier so that

it can keep its routing information up to date.

Figure 6-8. Using ZooKeeper to keep track of assignment of partitions to nodes.

Request Routing | 215

For example, LinkedIn’s Espresso uses Helix [31] for cluster management (which in turn relies on ZooKeeper), implementing a routing tier as shown in Figure 6-8.

HBase, SolrCloud, and Kafka also use ZooKeeper to track partition assignment.

MongoDB has a similar architecture, but it relies on its own config server implemen‐

tation and mongos daemons as the routing tier.

Cassandra and Riak take a different approach: they use a gossip protocol among the

nodes to disseminate any changes in cluster state. Requests can be sent to any node,

and that node forwards them to the appropriate node for the requested partition

(approach 1 in Figure 6-7). This model puts more complexity in the database nodes

but avoids the dependency on an external coordination service such as ZooKeeper.

Couchbase does not rebalance automatically, which simplifies the design. Normally it

is configured with a routing tier called moxi, which learns about routing changes

from the cluster nodes [32].

When using a routing tier or when sending requests to a random node, clients still

need to find the IP addresses to connect to. These are not as fast-changing as the

assignment of partitions to nodes, so it is often sufficient to use DNS for this purpose.

Parallel Query Execution

So far we have focused on very simple queries that read or write a single key (plus

scatter/gather queries in the case of document-partitioned secondary indexes). This is

about the level of access supported by most NoSQL distributed datastores.

However, massively parallel processing (MPP) relational database products, often

used for analytics, are much more sophisticated in the types of queries they support.

A typical data warehouse query contains several join, filtering, grouping, and aggre‐

gation operations. The MPP query optimizer breaks this complex query into a num‐

ber of execution stages and partitions, many of which can be executed in parallel on

different nodes of the database cluster. Queries that involve scanning over large parts

of the dataset particularly benefit from such parallel execution.

Fast parallel execution of data warehouse queries is a specialized topic, and given the

business importance of analytics, it receives a lot of commercial interest. We will dis‐

cuss some techniques for parallel query execution in Chapter 10. For a more detailed

overview of techniques used in parallel databases, please see the references [1, 33].

Summary

In this chapter we explored different ways of partitioning a large dataset into smaller

subsets. Partitioning is necessary when you have so much data that storing and pro‐

cessing it on a single machine is no longer feasible.

216 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

The goal of partitioning is to spread the data and query load evenly across multiple

machines, avoiding hot spots (nodes with disproportionately high load). This

requires choosing a partitioning scheme that is appropriate to your data, and reba‐

lancing the partitions when nodes are added to or removed from the cluster.

We discussed two main approaches to partitioning:

• Key range partitioning, where keys are sorted, and a partition owns all the keys

from some minimum up to some maximum. Sorting has the advantage that effi‐

cient range queries are possible, but there is a risk of hot spots if the application

often accesses keys that are close together in the sorted order.

In this approach, partitions are typically rebalanced dynamically by splitting the

range into two subranges when a partition gets too big.

• Hash partitioning, where a hash function is applied to each key, and a partition

owns a range of hashes. This method destroys the ordering of keys, making range

queries inefficient, but may distribute load more evenly.

When partitioning by hash, it is common to create a fixed number of partitions

in advance, to assign several partitions to each node, and to move entire parti‐

tions from one node to another when nodes are added or removed. Dynamic

partitioning can also be used.

Hybrid approaches are also possible, for example with a compound key: using one

part of the key to identify the partition and another part for the sort order.

We also discussed the interaction between partitioning and secondary indexes. A sec‐

ondary index also needs to be partitioned, and there are two methods:

• Document-partitioned indexes (local indexes), where the secondary indexes are

stored in the same partition as the primary key and value. This means that only a

single partition needs to be updated on write, but a read of the secondary index

requires a scatter/gather across all partitions.

• Term-partitioned indexes (global indexes), where the secondary indexes are parti‐

tioned separately, using the indexed values. An entry in the secondary index may

include records from all partitions of the primary key. When a document is writ‐

ten, several partitions of the secondary index need to be updated; however, a read

can be served from a single partition.

Finally, we discussed techniques for routing queries to the appropriate partition,

which range from simple partition-aware load balancing to sophisticated parallel

query execution engines.

By design, every partition operates mostly independently—that’s what allows a parti‐

tioned database to scale to multiple machines. However, operations that need to write

Summary | 217

to several partitions can be difficult to reason about: for example, what happens if the

write to one partition succeeds, but another fails? We will address that question in the

following chapters.

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218 | Chapter 6: Partitioning

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Summary | 219

CHAPTER 7

Transactions

Some authors have claimed that general two-phase commit is too expensive to support,

because of the performance or availability problems that it brings. We believe it is better to

have application programmers deal with performance problems due to overuse of transac‐

tions as bottlenecks arise, rather than always coding around the lack of transactions.

—James Corbett et al., Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database (2012)

In the harsh reality of data systems, many things can go wrong:

• The database software or hardware may fail at any time (including in the middle

of a write operation).

• The application may crash at any time (including halfway through a series of

operations).

• Interruptions in the network can unexpectedly cut off the application from the

database, or one database node from another.

• Several clients may write to the database at the same time, overwriting each

other’s changes.

• A client may read data that doesn’t make sense because it has only partially been

updated.

• Race conditions between clients can cause surprising bugs.

In order to be reliable, a system has to deal with these faults and ensure that they

don’t cause catastrophic failure of the entire system. However, implementing fault-

tolerance mechanisms is a lot of work. It requires a lot of careful thinking about all

the things that can go wrong, and a lot of testing to ensure that the solution actually

works.

221

For decades, transactions have been the mechanism of choice for simplifying these

issues. A transaction is a way for an application to group several reads and writes

together into a logical unit. Conceptually, all the reads and writes in a transaction are

executed as one operation: either the entire transaction succeeds ( commit) or it fails

( abort, rollback). If it fails, the application can safely retry. With transactions, error

handling becomes much simpler for an application, because it doesn’t need to worry

about partial failure—i.e., the case where some operations succeed and some fail (for

whatever reason).

If you have spent years working with transactions, they may seem obvious, but we

shouldn’t take them for granted. Transactions are not a law of nature; they were cre‐

ated with a purpose, namely to simplify the programming model for applications

accessing a database. By using transactions, the application is free to ignore certain

potential error scenarios and concurrency issues, because the database takes care of

them instead (we call these safety guarantees).

Not every application needs transactions, and sometimes there are advantages to

weakening transactional guarantees or abandoning them entirely (for example, to

achieve higher performance or higher availability). Some safety properties can be

achieved without transactions.

How do you figure out whether you need transactions? In order to answer that ques‐

tion, we first need to understand exactly what safety guarantees transactions can pro‐

vide, and what costs are associated with them. Although transactions seem

straightforward at first glance, there are actually many subtle but important details

that come into play.

In this chapter, we will examine many examples of things that can go wrong, and

explore the algorithms that databases use to guard against those issues. We will go

especially deep in the area of concurrency control, discussing various kinds of race

conditions that can occur and how databases implement isolation levels such as read

committed, snapshot isolation, and serializability.

This chapter applies to both single-node and distributed databases; in Chapter 8 we

will focus the discussion on the particular challenges that arise only in distributed

systems.

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction

Almost all relational databases today, and some nonrelational databases, support

transactions. Most of them follow the style that was introduced in 1975 by IBM Sys‐

tem R, the first SQL database [1, 2, 3]. Although some implementation details have

changed, the general idea has remained virtually the same for 40 years: the transac‐

tion support in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc., is uncannily similar to

that of System R.

222 | Chapter 7: Transactions

In the late 2000s, nonrelational (NoSQL) databases started gaining popularity. They

aimed to improve upon the relational status quo by offering a choice of new data

models (see Chapter 2), and by including replication (Chapter 5) and partitioning

(Chapter 6) by default. Transactions were the main casualty of this movement: many

of this new generation of databases abandoned transactions entirely, or redefined the

word to describe a much weaker set of guarantees than had previously been under‐

stood [4].

With the hype around this new crop of distributed databases, there emerged a popu‐

lar belief that transactions were the antithesis of scalability, and that any large-scale

system would have to abandon transactions in order to maintain good performance

and high availability [5, 6]. On the other hand, transactional guarantees are some‐

times presented by database vendors as an essential requirement for “serious applica‐

tions” with “valuable data.” Both viewpoints are pure hyperbole.

The truth is not that simple: like every other technical design choice, transactions

have advantages and limitations. In order to understand those trade-offs, let’s go into

the details of the guarantees that transactions can provide—both in normal operation

and in various extreme (but realistic) circumstances.

The Meaning of ACID

The safety guarantees provided by transactions are often described by the well-

known acronym ACID, which stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. It was coined in 1983 by Theo Härder and Andreas Reuter [7] in an effort to establish precise terminology for fault-tolerance mechanisms in databases.

However, in practice, one database’s implementation of ACID does not equal

another’s implementation. For example, as we shall see, there is a lot of ambiguity

around the meaning of isolation [8]. The high-level idea is sound, but the devil is in

the details. Today, when a system claims to be “ACID compliant,” it’s unclear what

guarantees you can actually expect. ACID has unfortunately become mostly a mar‐

keting term.

(Systems that do not meet the ACID criteria are sometimes called BASE, which

stands for Basically Available, Soft state, and Eventual consistency [9]. This is even more vague than the definition of ACID. It seems that the only sensible definition of BASE is “not ACID”; i.e., it can mean almost anything you want.)

Let’s dig into the definitions of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, as

this will let us refine our idea of transactions.

Atomicity

In general, atomic refers to something that cannot be broken down into smaller parts.

The word means similar but subtly different things in different branches of comput‐

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction | 223

ing. For example, in multi-threaded programming, if one thread executes an atomic

operation, that means there is no way that another thread could see the half-finished

result of the operation. The system can only be in the state it was before the operation

or after the operation, not something in between.

By contrast, in the context of ACID, atomicity is not about concurrency. It does not

describe what happens if several processes try to access the same data at the same

time, because that is covered under the letter I, for isolation (see “Isolation” on page

225).

Rather, ACID atomicity describes what happens if a client wants to make several

writes, but a fault occurs after some of the writes have been processed—for example,

a process crashes, a network connection is interrupted, a disk becomes full, or some

integrity constraint is violated. If the writes are grouped together into an atomic

transaction, and the transaction cannot be completed ( committed) due to a fault, then

the transaction is aborted and the database must discard or undo any writes it has

made so far in that transaction.

Without atomicity, if an error occurs partway through making multiple changes, it’s

difficult to know which changes have taken effect and which haven’t. The application

could try again, but that risks making the same change twice, leading to duplicate or

incorrect data. Atomicity simplifies this problem: if a transaction was aborted, the

application can be sure that it didn’t change anything, so it can safely be retried.

The ability to abort a transaction on error and have all writes from that transaction

discarded is the defining feature of ACID atomicity. Perhaps abortability would have

been a better term than atomicity, but we will stick with atomicity since that’s the

usual word.

Consistency

The word consistency is terribly overloaded:

• In Chapter 5 we discussed replica consistency and the issue of eventual consistency that arises in asynchronously replicated systems (see “Problems with Repli‐

cation Lag” on page 161).

• Consistent hashing is an approach to partitioning that some systems use for reba‐

lancing (see “Consistent Hashing” on page 204).

• In the CAP theorem (see Chapter 9), the word consistency is used to mean linearizability (see “Linearizability” on page 324).

• In the context of ACID, consistency refers to an application-specific notion of the

database being in a “good state.”

It’s unfortunate that the same word is used with at least four different meanings.

224 | Chapter 7: Transactions

The idea of ACID consistency is that you have certain statements about your data

( invariants) that must always be true—for example, in an accounting system, credits

and debits across all accounts must always be balanced. If a transaction starts with a

database that is valid according to these invariants, and any writes during the transac‐

tion preserve the validity, then you can be sure that the invariants are always satisfied.

However, this idea of consistency depends on the application’s notion of invariants,

and it’s the application’s responsibility to define its transactions correctly so that they

preserve consistency. This is not something that the database can guarantee: if you

write bad data that violates your invariants, the database can’t stop you. (Some spe‐

cific kinds of invariants can be checked by the database, for example using foreign

key constraints or uniqueness constraints. However, in general, the application

defines what data is valid or invalid—the database only stores it.)

Atomicity, isolation, and durability are properties of the database, whereas consis‐

tency (in the ACID sense) is a property of the application. The application may rely

on the database’s atomicity and isolation properties in order to achieve consistency,

but it’s not up to the database alone. Thus, the letter C doesn’t really belong in ACID.i

Isolation

Most databases are accessed by several clients at the same time. That is no problem if

they are reading and writing different parts of the database, but if they are accessing

the same database records, you can run into concurrency problems (race conditions).

Figure 7-1 is a simple example of this kind of problem. Say you have two clients

simultaneously incrementing a counter that is stored in a database. Each client needs

to read the current value, add 1, and write the new value back (assuming there is no

increment operation built into the database). In Figure 7-1 the counter should have

increased from 42 to 44, because two increments happened, but it actually only went

to 43 because of the race condition.

Isolation in the sense of ACID means that concurrently executing transactions are

isolated from each other: they cannot step on each other’s toes. The classic database

textbooks formalize isolation as serializability, which means that each transaction can

pretend that it is the only transaction running on the entire database. The database

ensures that when the transactions have committed, the result is the same as if they

had run serially (one after another), even though in reality they may have run con‐

currently [10].

i. Joe Hellerstein has remarked that the C in ACID was “tossed in to make the acronym work” in Härder and

Reuter’s paper [7], and that it wasn’t considered important at the time.

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction | 225

Figure 7-1. A race condition between two clients concurrently incrementing a counter.

However, in practice, serializable isolation is rarely used, because it carries a perfor‐

mance penalty. Some popular databases, such as Oracle 11g, don’t even implement it.

In Oracle there is an isolation level called “serializable,” but it actually implements

something called snapshot isolation, which is a weaker guarantee than serializability

[8, 11]. We will explore snapshot isolation and other forms of isolation in “Weak Iso‐

lation Levels” on page 233.

Durability

The purpose of a database system is to provide a safe place where data can be stored

without fear of losing it. Durability is the promise that once a transaction has com‐

mitted successfully, any data it has written will not be forgotten, even if there is a

hardware fault or the database crashes.

In a single-node database, durability typically means that the data has been written to

nonvolatile storage such as a hard drive or SSD. It usually also involves a write-ahead

log or similar (see “Making B-trees reliable” on page 82), which allows recovery in the

event that the data structures on disk are corrupted. In a replicated database, durabil‐

ity may mean that the data has been successfully copied to some number of nodes. In

order to provide a durability guarantee, a database must wait until these writes or

replications are complete before reporting a transaction as successfully committed.

As discussed in “Reliability” on page 6, perfect durability does not exist: if all your

hard disks and all your backups are destroyed at the same time, there’s obviously

nothing your database can do to save you.

226 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Replication and Durability

Historically, durability meant writing to an archive tape. Then it was understood as

writing to a disk or SSD. More recently, it has been adapted to mean replication.

Which implementation is better?

The truth is, nothing is perfect:

• If you write to disk and the machine dies, even though your data isn’t lost, it is

inaccessible until you either fix the machine or transfer the disk to another

machine. Replicated systems can remain available.

• A correlated fault—a power outage or a bug that crashes every node on a particu‐

lar input—can knock out all replicas at once (see “Reliability” on page 6), losing

any data that is only in memory. Writing to disk is therefore still relevant for in-

memory databases.

• In an asynchronously replicated system, recent writes may be lost when the

leader becomes unavailable (see “Handling Node Outages” on page 156).

• When the power is suddenly cut, SSDs in particular have been shown to some‐

times violate the guarantees they are supposed to provide: even fsync isn’t guar‐

anteed to work correctly [12]. Disk firmware can have bugs, just like any other

kind of software [13, 14].

• Subtle interactions between the storage engine and the filesystem implementa‐

tion can lead to bugs that are hard to track down, and may cause files on disk to

be corrupted after a crash [15, 16].

• Data on disk can gradually become corrupted without this being detected [17]. If

data has been corrupted for some time, replicas and recent backups may also be

corrupted. In this case, you will need to try to restore the data from a historical

backup.

• One study of SSDs found that between 30% and 80% of drives develop at least

one bad block during the first four years of operation [18]. Magnetic hard drives

have a lower rate of bad sectors, but a higher rate of complete failure than SSDs.

• If an SSD is disconnected from power, it can start losing data within a few weeks,

depending on the temperature [19].

In practice, there is no one technique that can provide absolute guarantees. There are

only various risk-reduction techniques, including writing to disk, replicating to

remote machines, and backups—and they can and should be used together. As

always, it’s wise to take any theoretical “guarantees” with a healthy grain of salt.

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction | 227

Single-Object and Multi-Object Operations

To recap, in ACID, atomicity and isolation describe what the database should do if a

client makes several writes within the same transaction:

Atomicity

If an error occurs halfway through a sequence of writes, the transaction should

be aborted, and the writes made up to that point should be discarded. In other

words, the database saves you from having to worry about partial failure, by giv‐

ing an all-or-nothing guarantee.

Isolation

Concurrently running transactions shouldn’t interfere with each other. For

example, if one transaction makes several writes, then another transaction should

see either all or none of those writes, but not some subset.

These definitions assume that you want to modify several objects (rows, documents,

records) at once. Such multi-object transactions are often needed if several pieces of

data need to be kept in sync. Figure 7-2 shows an example from an email application.

To display the number of unread messages for a user, you could query something

like:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM emails WHERE recipient_id = 2 AND unread_flag = true However, you might find this query to be too slow if there are many emails, and decide to store the number of unread messages in a separate field (a kind of denorm‐

alization). Now, whenever a new message comes in, you have to increment the

unread counter as well, and whenever a message is marked as read, you also have to

decrement the unread counter.

In Figure 7-2, user 2 experiences an anomaly: the mailbox listing shows an unread

message, but the counter shows zero unread messages because the counter increment

has not yet happened.ii Isolation would have prevented this issue by ensuring that

user 2 sees either both the inserted email and the updated counter, or neither, but not

an inconsistent halfway point.

ii. Arguably, an incorrect counter in an email application is not a particularly critical problem. Alternatively, think of a customer account balance instead of an unread counter, and a payment transaction instead of an email.

228 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Figure 7-2. Violating isolation: one transaction reads another transaction’s uncommit‐

ted writes (a “dirty read”).

Figure 7-3 illustrates the need for atomicity: if an error occurs somewhere over the

course of the transaction, the contents of the mailbox and the unread counter might

become out of sync. In an atomic transaction, if the update to the counter fails, the

transaction is aborted and the inserted email is rolled back.

Figure 7-3. Atomicity ensures that if an error occurs any prior writes from that transac‐

tion are undone, to avoid an inconsistent state.

Multi-object transactions require some way of determining which read and write

operations belong to the same transaction. In relational databases, that is typically

done based on the client’s TCP connection to the database server: on any particular

connection, everything between a BEGIN TRANSACTION and a COMMIT statement is

considered to be part of the same transaction.iii

iii. This is not ideal. If the TCP connection is interrupted, the transaction must be aborted. If the interruption happens after the client has requested a commit but before the server acknowledges that the commit happened, the client doesn’t know whether the transaction was committed or not. To solve this issue, a transaction manager can group operations by a unique transaction identifier that is not bound to a particular TCP

connection. We will return to this topic in “The End-to-End Argument for Databases” on page 516.

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction | 229

On the other hand, many nonrelational databases don’t have such a way of grouping

operations together. Even if there is a multi-object API (for example, a key-value

store may have a multi-put operation that updates several keys in one operation), that

doesn’t necessarily mean it has transaction semantics: the command may succeed for

some keys and fail for others, leaving the database in a partially updated state.

Single-object writes

Atomicity and isolation also apply when a single object is being changed. For exam‐

ple, imagine you are writing a 20 KB JSON document to a database:

• If the network connection is interrupted after the first 10 KB have been sent, does

the database store that unparseable 10 KB fragment of JSON?

• If the power fails while the database is in the middle of overwriting the previous

value on disk, do you end up with the old and new values spliced together?

• If another client reads that document while the write is in progress, will it see a

partially updated value?

Those issues would be incredibly confusing, so storage engines almost universally

aim to provide atomicity and isolation on the level of a single object (such as a key-

value pair) on one node. Atomicity can be implemented using a log for crash recov‐

ery (see “Making B-trees reliable” on page 82), and isolation can be implemented

using a lock on each object (allowing only one thread to access an object at any one

time).

Some databases also provide more complex atomic operations,iv such as an increment

operation, which removes the need for a read-modify-write cycle like that in

Figure 7-1. Similarly popular is a compare-and-set operation, which allows a write to

happen only if the value has not been concurrently changed by someone else (see

“Compare-and-set” on page 245).

These single-object operations are useful, as they can prevent lost updates when sev‐

eral clients try to write to the same object concurrently (see “Preventing Lost

Updates” on page 242). However, they are not transactions in the usual sense of the

word. Compare-and-set and other single-object operations have been dubbed “light‐

weight transactions” or even “ACID” for marketing purposes [20, 21, 22], but that

terminology is misleading. A transaction is usually understood as a mechanism for

grouping multiple operations on multiple objects into one unit of execution.

iv. Strictly speaking, the term atomic increment uses the word atomic in the sense of multi-threaded programming. In the context of ACID, it should actually be called isolated or serializable increment. But that’s getting nitpicky.

230 | Chapter 7: Transactions

The need for multi-object transactions

Many distributed datastores have abandoned multi-object transactions because they

are difficult to implement across partitions, and they can get in the way in some sce‐

narios where very high availability or performance is required. However, there is

nothing that fundamentally prevents transactions in a distributed database, and we

will discuss implementations of distributed transactions in Chapter 9.

But do we need multi-object transactions at all? Would it be possible to implement

any application with only a key-value data model and single-object operations?

There are some use cases in which single-object inserts, updates, and deletes are suffi‐

cient. However, in many other cases writes to several different objects need to be

coordinated:

• In a relational data model, a row in one table often has a foreign key reference to

a row in another table. (Similarly, in a graph-like data model, a vertex has edges

to other vertices.) Multi-object transactions allow you to ensure that these refer‐

ences remain valid: when inserting several records that refer to one another, the

foreign keys have to be correct and up to date, or the data becomes nonsensical.

• In a document data model, the fields that need to be updated together are often

within the same document, which is treated as a single object—no multi-object

transactions are needed when updating a single document. However, document

databases lacking join functionality also encourage denormalization (see “Rela‐

tional Versus Document Databases Today” on page 38). When denormalized

information needs to be updated, like in the example of Figure 7-2, you need to

update several documents in one go. Transactions are very useful in this situation

to prevent denormalized data from going out of sync.

• In databases with secondary indexes (almost everything except pure key-value

stores), the indexes also need to be updated every time you change a value. These

indexes are different database objects from a transaction point of view: for exam‐

ple, without transaction isolation, it’s possible for a record to appear in one index

but not another, because the update to the second index hasn’t happened yet.

Such applications can still be implemented without transactions. However, error han‐

dling becomes much more complicated without atomicity, and the lack of isolation

can cause concurrency problems. We will discuss those in “Weak Isolation Levels” on

page 233, and explore alternative approaches in Chapter 12.

Handling errors and aborts

A key feature of a transaction is that it can be aborted and safely retried if an error

occurred. ACID databases are based on this philosophy: if the database is in danger

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction | 231

of violating its guarantee of atomicity, isolation, or durability, it would rather aban‐

don the transaction entirely than allow it to remain half-finished.

Not all systems follow that philosophy, though. In particular, datastores with leader‐

less replication (see “Leaderless Replication” on page 177) work much more on a

“best effort” basis, which could be summarized as “the database will do as much as it

can, and if it runs into an error, it won’t undo something it has already done”—so it’s

the application’s responsibility to recover from errors.

Errors will inevitably happen, but many software developers prefer to think only

about the happy path rather than the intricacies of error handling. For example, pop‐

ular object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks such as Rails’s ActiveRecord and

Django don’t retry aborted transactions—the error usually results in an exception

bubbling up the stack, so any user input is thrown away and the user gets an error

message. This is a shame, because the whole point of aborts is to enable safe retries.

Although retrying an aborted transaction is a simple and effective error handling

mechanism, it isn’t perfect:

• If the transaction actually succeeded, but the network failed while the server tried

to acknowledge the successful commit to the client (so the client thinks it failed),

then retrying the transaction causes it to be performed twice—unless you have an

additional application-level deduplication mechanism in place.

• If the error is due to overload, retrying the transaction will make the problem

worse, not better. To avoid such feedback cycles, you can limit the number of

retries, use exponential backoff, and handle overload-related errors differently

from other errors (if possible).

• It is only worth retrying after transient errors (for example due to deadlock, iso‐

lation violation, temporary network interruptions, and failover); after a perma‐

nent error (e.g., constraint violation) a retry would be pointless.

• If the transaction also has side effects outside of the database, those side effects

may happen even if the transaction is aborted. For example, if you’re sending an

email, you wouldn’t want to send the email again every time you retry the trans‐

action. If you want to make sure that several different systems either commit or

abort together, two-phase commit can help (we will discuss this in “Atomic

Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)” on page 354).

• If the client process fails while retrying, any data it was trying to write to the

database is lost.

232 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Weak Isolation Levels

If two transactions don’t touch the same data, they can safely be run in parallel,

because neither depends on the other. Concurrency issues (race conditions) only

come into play when one transaction reads data that is concurrently modified by

another transaction, or when two transactions try to simultaneously modify the same

data.

Concurrency bugs are hard to find by testing, because such bugs are only triggered

when you get unlucky with the timing. Such timing issues might occur very rarely,

and are usually difficult to reproduce. Concurrency is also very difficult to reason

about, especially in a large application where you don’t necessarily know which other

pieces of code are accessing the database. Application development is difficult

enough if you just have one user at a time; having many concurrent users makes it

much harder still, because any piece of data could unexpectedly change at any time.

For that reason, databases have long tried to hide concurrency issues from applica‐

tion developers by providing transaction isolation. In theory, isolation should make

your life easier by letting you pretend that no concurrency is happening: serializable

isolation means that the database guarantees that transactions have the same effect as

if they ran serially (i.e., one at a time, without any concurrency).

In practice, isolation is unfortunately not that simple. Serializable isolation has a per‐

formance cost, and many databases don’t want to pay that price [8]. It’s therefore

common for systems to use weaker levels of isolation, which protect against some

concurrency issues, but not all. Those levels of isolation are much harder to under‐

stand, and they can lead to subtle bugs, but they are nevertheless used in practice

[23].

Concurrency bugs caused by weak transaction isolation are not just a theoretical

problem. They have caused substantial loss of money [24, 25], led to investigation by

financial auditors [26], and caused customer data to be corrupted [27]. A popular

comment on revelations of such problems is “Use an ACID database if you’re han‐

dling financial data!”—but that misses the point. Even many popular relational data‐

base systems (which are usually considered “ACID”) use weak isolation, so they

wouldn’t necessarily have prevented these bugs from occurring.

Rather than blindly relying on tools, we need to develop a good understanding of the

kinds of concurrency problems that exist, and how to prevent them. Then we can

build applications that are reliable and correct, using the tools at our disposal.

In this section we will look at several weak (nonserializable) isolation levels that are

used in practice, and discuss in detail what kinds of race conditions can and cannot

occur, so that you can decide what level is appropriate to your application. Once

we’ve done that, we will discuss serializability in detail (see “Serializability” on page

Weak Isolation Levels | 233

251). Our discussion of isolation levels will be informal, using examples. If you want

rigorous definitions and analyses of their properties, you can find them in the aca‐

demic literature [28, 29, 30].

Read Committed

The most basic level of transaction isolation is read committed.v It makes two guaran‐

tees:

1. When reading from the database, you will only see data that has been committed

(no dirty reads).

2. When writing to the database, you will only overwrite data that has been com‐

mitted (no dirty writes).

Let’s discuss these two guarantees in more detail.

No dirty reads

Imagine a transaction has written some data to the database, but the transaction has

not yet committed or aborted. Can another transaction see that uncommitted data? If

yes, that is called a dirty read [2].

Transactions running at the read committed isolation level must prevent dirty reads.

This means that any writes by a transaction only become visible to others when that

transaction commits (and then all of its writes become visible at once). This is illus‐

trated in Figure 7-4, where user 1 has set x = 3, but user 2’s get x still returns the old value, 2, while user 1 has not yet committed.

Figure 7-4. No dirty reads: user 2 sees the new value for x only after user 1’s transaction

has committed.

v. Some databases support an even weaker isolation level called read uncommitted. It prevents dirty writes, but does not prevent dirty reads.

234 | Chapter 7: Transactions

There are a few reasons why it’s useful to prevent dirty reads:

• If a transaction needs to update several objects, a dirty read means that another

transaction may see some of the updates but not others. For example, in

Figure 7-2, the user sees the new unread email but not the updated counter. This

is a dirty read of the email. Seeing the database in a partially updated state is con‐

fusing to users and may cause other transactions to take incorrect decisions.

• If a transaction aborts, any writes it has made need to be rolled back (like in

Figure 7-3). If the database allows dirty reads, that means a transaction may see

data that is later rolled back—i.e., which is never actually committed to the data‐

base. Reasoning about the consequences quickly becomes mind-bending.

No dirty writes

What happens if two transactions concurrently try to update the same object in a

database? We don’t know in which order the writes will happen, but we normally

assume that the later write overwrites the earlier write.

However, what happens if the earlier write is part of a transaction that has not yet

committed, so the later write overwrites an uncommitted value? This is called a dirty

write [28]. Transactions running at the read committed isolation level must prevent dirty writes, usually by delaying the second write until the first write’s transaction has committed or aborted.

By preventing dirty writes, this isolation level avoids some kinds of concurrency

problems:

• If transactions update multiple objects, dirty writes can lead to a bad outcome.

For example, consider Figure 7-5, which illustrates a used car sales website on

which two people, Alice and Bob, are simultaneously trying to buy the same car.

Buying a car requires two database writes: the listing on the website needs to be

updated to reflect the buyer, and the sales invoice needs to be sent to the buyer.

In the case of Figure 7-5, the sale is awarded to Bob (because he performs the

winning update to the listings table), but the invoice is sent to Alice (because

she performs the winning update to the invoices table). Read committed pre‐

vents such mishaps.

• However, read committed does not prevent the race condition between two

counter increments in Figure 7-1. In this case, the second write happens after the

first transaction has committed, so it’s not a dirty write. It’s still incorrect, but for

a different reason—in “Preventing Lost Updates” on page 242 we will discuss how

to make such counter increments safe.

Weak Isolation Levels | 235

Figure 7-5. With dirty writes, conflicting writes from different transactions can be

mixed up.

Implementing read committed

Read committed is a very popular isolation level. It is the default setting in Oracle

11g, PostgreSQL, SQL Server 2012, MemSQL, and many other databases [8].

Most commonly, databases prevent dirty writes by using row-level locks: when a

transaction wants to modify a particular object (row or document), it must first

acquire a lock on that object. It must then hold that lock until the transaction is com‐

mitted or aborted. Only one transaction can hold the lock for any given object; if

another transaction wants to write to the same object, it must wait until the first

transaction is committed or aborted before it can acquire the lock and continue. This

locking is done automatically by databases in read committed mode (or stronger iso‐

lation levels).

How do we prevent dirty reads? One option would be to use the same lock, and to

require any transaction that wants to read an object to briefly acquire the lock and

then release it again immediately after reading. This would ensure that a read

couldn’t happen while an object has a dirty, uncommitted value (because during that

time the lock would be held by the transaction that has made the write).

However, the approach of requiring read locks does not work well in practice,

because one long-running write transaction can force many read-only transactions to

wait until the long-running transaction has completed. This harms the response time

of read-only transactions and is bad for operability: a slowdown in one part of an

application can have a knock-on effect in a completely different part of the applica‐

tion, due to waiting for locks.

236 | Chapter 7: Transactions

For that reason, most databasesvi prevent dirty reads using the approach illustrated in

Figure 7-4: for every object that is written, the database remembers both the old com‐

mitted value and the new value set by the transaction that currently holds the write

lock. While the transaction is ongoing, any other transactions that read the object are

simply given the old value. Only when the new value is committed do transactions

switch over to reading the new value.

Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read

If you look superficially at read committed isolation, you could be forgiven for think‐

ing that it does everything that a transaction needs to do: it allows aborts (required

for atomicity), it prevents reading the incomplete results of transactions, and it pre‐

vents concurrent writes from getting intermingled. Indeed, those are useful features,

and much stronger guarantees than you can get from a system that has no transac‐

tions.

However, there are still plenty of ways in which you can have concurrency bugs when

using this isolation level. For example, Figure 7-6 illustrates a problem that can occur with read committed.

Figure 7-6. Read skew: Alice observes the database in an inconsistent state.

Say Alice has $1,000 of savings at a bank, split across two accounts with $500 each.

Now a transaction transfers $100 from one of her accounts to the other. If she is

unlucky enough to look at her list of account balances in the same moment as that

transaction is being processed, she may see one account balance at a time before the

vi. At the time of writing, the only mainstream databases that use locks for read committed isolation are IBM

DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server in the read_committed_snapshot=off configuration [23, 36].

Weak Isolation Levels | 237

incoming payment has arrived (with a balance of $500), and the other account after

the outgoing transfer has been made (the new balance being $400). To Alice it now

appears as though she only has a total of $900 in her accounts—it seems that $100 has

vanished into thin air.

This anomaly is called a nonrepeatable read or read skew: if Alice were to read the

balance of account 1 again at the end of the transaction, she would see a different

value ($600) than she saw in her previous query. Read skew is considered acceptable

under read committed isolation: the account balances that Alice saw were indeed

committed at the time when she read them.

The term skew is unfortunately overloaded: we previously used it in

the sense of an unbalanced workload with hot spots (see “Skewed

Workloads and Relieving Hot Spots” on page 205), whereas here it

means timing anomaly.

In Alice’s case, this is not a lasting problem, because she will most likely see consis‐

tent account balances if she reloads the online banking website a few seconds later.

However, some situations cannot tolerate such temporary inconsistency:

Backups

Taking a backup requires making a copy of the entire database, which may take

hours on a large database. During the time that the backup process is running,

writes will continue to be made to the database. Thus, you could end up with

some parts of the backup containing an older version of the data, and other parts

containing a newer version. If you need to restore from such a backup, the

inconsistencies (such as disappearing money) become permanent.

Analytic queries and integrity checks

Sometimes, you may want to run a query that scans over large parts of the data‐

base. Such queries are common in analytics (see “Transaction Processing or Ana‐

lytics?” on page 90), or may be part of a periodic integrity check that everything

is in order (monitoring for data corruption). These queries are likely to return

nonsensical results if they observe parts of the database at different points in

time.

Snapshot isolation [28] is the most common solution to this problem. The idea is that

each transaction reads from a consistent snapshot of the database—that is, the trans‐

action sees all the data that was committed in the database at the start of the transac‐

tion. Even if the data is subsequently changed by another transaction, each

transaction sees only the old data from that particular point in time.

Snapshot isolation is a boon for long-running, read-only queries such as backups and

analytics. It is very hard to reason about the meaning of a query if the data on which

238 | Chapter 7: Transactions

it operates is changing at the same time as the query is executing. When a transaction

can see a consistent snapshot of the database, frozen at a particular point in time, it is

much easier to understand.

Snapshot isolation is a popular feature: it is supported by PostgreSQL, MySQL with

the InnoDB storage engine, Oracle, SQL Server, and others [23, 31, 32].

Implementing snapshot isolation

Like read committed isolation, implementations of snapshot isolation typically use

write locks to prevent dirty writes (see “Implementing read committed” on page 236),

which means that a transaction that makes a write can block the progress of another

transaction that writes to the same object. However, reads do not require any locks.

From a performance point of view, a key principle of snapshot isolation is readers

never block writers, and writers never block readers. This allows a database to handle

long-running read queries on a consistent snapshot at the same time as processing

writes normally, without any lock contention between the two.

To implement snapshot isolation, databases use a generalization of the mechanism

we saw for preventing dirty reads in Figure 7-4. The database must potentially keep

several different committed versions of an object, because various in-progress trans‐

actions may need to see the state of the database at different points in time. Because it

maintains several versions of an object side by side, this technique is known as multi-

version concurrency control (MVCC).

If a database only needed to provide read committed isolation, but not snapshot iso‐

lation, it would be sufficient to keep two versions of an object: the committed version

and the overwritten-but-not-yet-committed version. However, storage engines that

support snapshot isolation typically use MVCC for their read committed isolation

level as well. A typical approach is that read committed uses a separate snapshot for

each query, while snapshot isolation uses the same snapshot for an entire transaction.

Figure 7-7 illustrates how MVCC-based snapshot isolation is implemented in Post‐

greSQL [31] (other implementations are similar). When a transaction is started, it is

given a unique, always-increasingvii transaction ID (txid). Whenever a transaction

writes anything to the database, the data it writes is tagged with the transaction ID of

the writer.

vii. To be precise, transaction IDs are 32-bit integers, so they overflow after approximately 4 billion transactions. PostgreSQL’s vacuum process performs cleanup which ensures that overflow does not affect the data.

Weak Isolation Levels | 239

Figure 7-7. Implementing snapshot isolation using multi-version objects.

Each row in a table has a created_by field, containing the ID of the transaction that

inserted this row into the table. Moreover, each row has a deleted_by field, which is

initially empty. If a transaction deletes a row, the row isn’t actually deleted from the

database, but it is marked for deletion by setting the deleted_by field to the ID of the

transaction that requested the deletion. At some later time, when it is certain that no

transaction can any longer access the deleted data, a garbage collection process in the

database removes any rows marked for deletion and frees their space.

An update is internally translated into a delete and a create. For example, in

Figure 7-7, transaction 13 deducts $100 from account 2, changing the balance from

$500 to $400. The accounts table now actually contains two rows for account 2: a

row with a balance of $500 which was marked as deleted by transaction 13, and a row

with a balance of $400 which was created by transaction 13.

Visibility rules for observing a consistent snapshot

When a transaction reads from the database, transaction IDs are used to decide

which objects it can see and which are invisible. By carefully defining visibility rules,

240 | Chapter 7: Transactions

the database can present a consistent snapshot of the database to the application. This

works as follows:

1. At the start of each transaction, the database makes a list of all the other transac‐

tions that are in progress (not yet committed or aborted) at that time. Any writes

that those transactions have made are ignored, even if the transactions subse‐

quently commit.

2. Any writes made by aborted transactions are ignored.

3. Any writes made by transactions with a later transaction ID (i.e., which started

after the current transaction started) are ignored, regardless of whether those

transactions have committed.

4. All other writes are visible to the application’s queries.

These rules apply to both creation and deletion of objects. In Figure 7-7, when trans‐

action 12 reads from account 2, it sees a balance of $500 because the deletion of the

$500 balance was made by transaction 13 (according to rule 3, transaction 12 cannot

see a deletion made by transaction 13), and the creation of the $400 balance is not yet

visible (by the same rule).

Put another way, an object is visible if both of the following conditions are true:

• At the time when the reader’s transaction started, the transaction that created the

object had already committed.

• The object is not marked for deletion, or if it is, the transaction that requested

deletion had not yet committed at the time when the reader’s transaction started.

A long-running transaction may continue using a snapshot for a long time, continu‐

ing to read values that (from other transactions’ point of view) have long been over‐

written or deleted. By never updating values in place but instead creating a new

version every time a value is changed, the database can provide a consistent snapshot

while incurring only a small overhead.

Indexes and snapshot isolation

How do indexes work in a multi-version database? One option is to have the index

simply point to all versions of an object and require an index query to filter out any

object versions that are not visible to the current transaction. When garbage collec‐

tion removes old object versions that are no longer visible to any transaction, the cor‐

responding index entries can also be removed.

In practice, many implementation details determine the performance of multi-

version concurrency control. For example, PostgreSQL has optimizations for avoid‐

ing index updates if different versions of the same object can fit on the same page

[31].

Weak Isolation Levels | 241

Another approach is used in CouchDB, Datomic, and LMDB. Although they also use

B-trees (see “B-Trees” on page 79), they use an append-only/copy-on-write variant that does not overwrite pages of the tree when they are updated, but instead creates a new copy of each modified page. Parent pages, up to the root of the tree, are copied

and updated to point to the new versions of their child pages. Any pages that are not

affected by a write do not need to be copied, and remain immutable [33, 34, 35].

With append-only B-trees, every write transaction (or batch of transactions) creates a

new B-tree root, and a particular root is a consistent snapshot of the database at the

point in time when it was created. There is no need to filter out objects based on

transaction IDs because subsequent writes cannot modify an existing B-tree; they can

only create new tree roots. However, this approach also requires a background pro‐

cess for compaction and garbage collection.

Repeatable read and naming confusion

Snapshot isolation is a useful isolation level, especially for read-only transactions.

However, many databases that implement it call it by different names. In Oracle it is

called serializable, and in PostgreSQL and MySQL it is called repeatable read [23].

The reason for this naming confusion is that the SQL standard doesn’t have the con‐

cept of snapshot isolation, because the standard is based on System R’s 1975 defini‐

tion of isolation levels [2] and snapshot isolation hadn’t yet been invented then.

Instead, it defines repeatable read, which looks superficially similar to snapshot isola‐

tion. PostgreSQL and MySQL call their snapshot isolation level repeatable read

because it meets the requirements of the standard, and so they can claim standards

compliance.

Unfortunately, the SQL standard’s definition of isolation levels is flawed—it is ambig‐

uous, imprecise, and not as implementation-independent as a standard should be

[28]. Even though several databases implement repeatable read, there are big differ‐

ences in the guarantees they actually provide, despite being ostensibly standardized

[23]. There has been a formal definition of repeatable read in the research literature

[29, 30], but most implementations don’t satisfy that formal definition. And to top it

off, IBM DB2 uses “repeatable read” to refer to serializability [8].

As a result, nobody really knows what repeatable read means.

Preventing Lost Updates

The read committed and snapshot isolation levels we’ve discussed so far have been

primarily about the guarantees of what a read-only transaction can see in the pres‐

ence of concurrent writes. We have mostly ignored the issue of two transactions writ‐

ing concurrently—we have only discussed dirty writes (see “No dirty writes” on page

235), one particular type of write-write conflict that can occur.

242 | Chapter 7: Transactions

There are several other interesting kinds of conflicts that can occur between concur‐

rently writing transactions. The best known of these is the lost update problem, illus‐

trated in Figure 7-1 with the example of two concurrent counter increments.

The lost update problem can occur if an application reads some value from the data‐

base, modifies it, and writes back the modified value (a read-modify-write cycle). If

two transactions do this concurrently, one of the modifications can be lost, because

the second write does not include the first modification. (We sometimes say that the

later write clobbers the earlier write.) This pattern occurs in various different

scenarios:

• Incrementing a counter or updating an account balance (requires reading the

current value, calculating the new value, and writing back the updated value)

• Making a local change to a complex value, e.g., adding an element to a list within

a JSON document (requires parsing the document, making the change, and writ‐

ing back the modified document)

• Two users editing a wiki page at the same time, where each user saves their

changes by sending the entire page contents to the server, overwriting whatever

is currently in the database

Because this is such a common problem, a variety of solutions have been developed.

Atomic write operations

Many databases provide atomic update operations, which remove the need to imple‐

ment read-modify-write cycles in application code. They are usually the best solution

if your code can be expressed in terms of those operations. For example, the follow‐

ing instruction is concurrency-safe in most relational databases:

UPDATE counters SET value = value + 1 WHERE key = 'foo';

Similarly, document databases such as MongoDB provide atomic operations for

making local modifications to a part of a JSON document, and Redis provides atomic

operations for modifying data structures such as priority queues. Not all writes can

easily be expressed in terms of atomic operations—for example, updates to a wiki

page involve arbitrary text editingviii—but in situations where atomic operations can

be used, they are usually the best choice.

Atomic operations are usually implemented by taking an exclusive lock on the object

when it is read so that no other transaction can read it until the update has been

viii. It is possible, albeit fairly complicated, to express the editing of a text document as a stream of atomic

mutations. See “Automatic Conflict Resolution” on page 174 for some pointers.

Weak Isolation Levels | 243

applied. This technique is sometimes known as cursor stability [36, 37]. Another

option is to simply force all atomic operations to be executed on a single thread.

Unfortunately, object-relational mapping frameworks make it easy to accidentally

write code that performs unsafe read-modify-write cycles instead of using atomic

operations provided by the database [38]. That’s not a problem if you know what you

are doing, but it is potentially a source of subtle bugs that are difficult to find by

testing.

Explicit locking

Another option for preventing lost updates, if the database’s built-in atomic opera‐

tions don’t provide the necessary functionality, is for the application to explicitly lock

objects that are going to be updated. Then the application can perform a read-

modify-write cycle, and if any other transaction tries to concurrently read the same

object, it is forced to wait until the first read-modify-write cycle has completed.

For example, consider a multiplayer game in which several players can move the

same figure concurrently. In this case, an atomic operation may not be sufficient,

because the application also needs to ensure that a player’s move abides by the rules

of the game, which involves some logic that you cannot sensibly implement as a data‐

base query. Instead, you may use a lock to prevent two players from concurrently

moving the same piece, as illustrated in Example 7-1.

Example 7-1. Explicitly locking rows to prevent lost updates

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

SELECT * FROM figures

WHERE name = 'robot' AND game_id = 222

FOR UPDATE;

-- Check whether move is valid, then update the position

-- of the piece that was returned by the previous SELECT.

UPDATE figures SET position = 'c4' WHERE id = 1234;

COMMIT;

The FOR UPDATE clause indicates that the database should take a lock on all rows

returned by this query.

This works, but to get it right, you need to carefully think about your application

logic. It’s easy to forget to add a necessary lock somewhere in the code, and thus

introduce a race condition.

244 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Automatically detecting lost updates

Atomic operations and locks are ways of preventing lost updates by forcing the read-

modify-write cycles to happen sequentially. An alternative is to allow them to execute

in parallel and, if the transaction manager detects a lost update, abort the transaction

and force it to retry its read-modify-write cycle.

An advantage of this approach is that databases can perform this check efficiently in

conjunction with snapshot isolation. Indeed, PostgreSQL’s repeatable read, Oracle’s

serializable, and SQL Server’s snapshot isolation levels automatically detect when a

lost update has occurred and abort the offending transaction. However, MySQL/

InnoDB’s repeatable read does not detect lost updates [23]. Some authors [28, 30]

argue that a database must prevent lost updates in order to qualify as providing snap‐

shot isolation, so MySQL does not provide snapshot isolation under this definition.

Lost update detection is a great feature, because it doesn’t require application code to

use any special database features—you may forget to use a lock or an atomic opera‐

tion and thus introduce a bug, but lost update detection happens automatically and is

thus less error-prone.

Compare-and-set

In databases that don’t provide transactions, you sometimes find an atomic compare-

and-set operation (previously mentioned in “Single-object writes” on page 230). The

purpose of this operation is to avoid lost updates by allowing an update to happen

only if the value has not changed since you last read it. If the current value does not

match what you previously read, the update has no effect, and the read-modify-write

cycle must be retried.

For example, to prevent two users concurrently updating the same wiki page, you

might try something like this, expecting the update to occur only if the content of the

page hasn’t changed since the user started editing it:

-- This may or may not be safe, depending on the database implementation

UPDATE wiki_pages SET content = 'new content'

WHERE id = 1234 AND content = 'old content';

If the content has changed and no longer matches 'old content', this update will

have no effect, so you need to check whether the update took effect and retry if neces‐

sary. However, if the database allows the WHERE clause to read from an old snapshot,

this statement may not prevent lost updates, because the condition may be true even

though another concurrent write is occurring. Check whether your database’s

compare-and-set operation is safe before relying on it.

Weak Isolation Levels | 245

Conflict resolution and replication

In replicated databases (see Chapter 5), preventing lost updates takes on another

dimension: since they have copies of the data on multiple nodes, and the data can

potentially be modified concurrently on different nodes, some additional steps need

to be taken to prevent lost updates.

Locks and compare-and-set operations assume that there is a single up-to-date copy

of the data. However, databases with multi-leader or leaderless replication usually

allow several writes to happen concurrently and replicate them asynchronously, so

they cannot guarantee that there is a single up-to-date copy of the data. Thus, techni‐

ques based on locks or compare-and-set do not apply in this context. (We will revisit

this issue in more detail in “Linearizability” on page 324.)

Instead, as discussed in “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184, a common

approach in such replicated databases is to allow concurrent writes to create several

conflicting versions of a value (also known as siblings), and to use application code or

special data structures to resolve and merge these versions after the fact.

Atomic operations can work well in a replicated context, especially if they are com‐

mutative (i.e., you can apply them in a different order on different replicas, and still

get the same result). For example, incrementing a counter or adding an element to a

set are commutative operations. That is the idea behind Riak 2.0 datatypes, which

prevent lost updates across replicas. When a value is concurrently updated by differ‐

ent clients, Riak automatically merges together the updates in such a way that no

updates are lost [39].

On the other hand, the last write wins (LWW) conflict resolution method is prone to

lost updates, as discussed in “Last write wins (discarding concurrent writes)” on page

186. Unfortunately, LWW is the default in many replicated databases.

Write Skew and Phantoms

In the previous sections we saw dirty writes and lost updates, two kinds of race condi‐

tions that can occur when different transactions concurrently try to write to the same

objects. In order to avoid data corruption, those race conditions need to be prevented

—either automatically by the database, or by manual safeguards such as using locks

or atomic write operations.

However, that is not the end of the list of potential race conditions that can occur

between concurrent writes. In this section we will see some subtler examples of

conflicts.

To begin, imagine this example: you are writing an application for doctors to manage

their on-call shifts at a hospital. The hospital usually tries to have several doctors on

call at any one time, but it absolutely must have at least one doctor on call. Doctors

246 | Chapter 7: Transactions

can give up their shifts (e.g., if they are sick themselves), provided that at least one

colleague remains on call in that shift [40, 41].

Now imagine that Alice and Bob are the two on-call doctors for a particular shift.

Both are feeling unwell, so they both decide to request leave. Unfortunately, they

happen to click the button to go off call at approximately the same time. What hap‐

pens next is illustrated in Figure 7-8.

Figure 7-8. Example of write skew causing an application bug.

In each transaction, your application first checks that two or more doctors are cur‐

rently on call; if yes, it assumes it’s safe for one doctor to go off call. Since the data‐

base is using snapshot isolation, both checks return 2, so both transactions proceed to

the next stage. Alice updates her own record to take herself off call, and Bob updates

his own record likewise. Both transactions commit, and now no doctor is on call.

Your requirement of having at least one doctor on call has been violated.

Characterizing write skew

This anomaly is called write skew [28]. It is neither a dirty write nor a lost update, because the two transactions are updating two different objects (Alice’s and Bob’s on-call records, respectively). It is less obvious that a conflict occurred here, but it’s definitely a race condition: if the two transactions had run one after another, the second Weak Isolation Levels | 247

doctor would have been prevented from going off call. The anomalous behavior was

only possible because the transactions ran concurrently.

You can think of write skew as a generalization of the lost update problem. Write

skew can occur if two transactions read the same objects, and then update some of

those objects (different transactions may update different objects). In the special case

where different transactions update the same object, you get a dirty write or lost

update anomaly (depending on the timing).

We saw that there are various different ways of preventing lost updates. With write

skew, our options are more restricted:

• Atomic single-object operations don’t help, as multiple objects are involved.

• The automatic detection of lost updates that you find in some implementations

of snapshot isolation unfortunately doesn’t help either: write skew is not auto‐

matically detected in PostgreSQL’s repeatable read, MySQL/InnoDB’s repeatable

read, Oracle’s serializable, or SQL Server’s snapshot isolation level [23]. Auto‐

matically preventing write skew requires true serializable isolation (see “Serializa‐

bility” on page 251).

• Some databases allow you to configure constraints, which are then enforced by

the database (e.g., uniqueness, foreign key constraints, or restrictions on a partic‐

ular value). However, in order to specify that at least one doctor must be on call,

you would need a constraint that involves multiple objects. Most databases do

not have built-in support for such constraints, but you may be able to implement

them with triggers or materialized views, depending on the database [42].

• If you can’t use a serializable isolation level, the second-best option in this case is

probably to explicitly lock the rows that the transaction depends on. In the doc‐

tors example, you could write something like the following:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

SELECT * FROM doctors

WHERE on_call = true

AND shift_id = 1234 FOR UPDATE;

UPDATE doctors

SET on_call = false

WHERE name = 'Alice'

AND shift_id = 1234;

COMMIT;

As before, FOR UPDATE tells the database to lock all rows returned by this

query.

248 | Chapter 7: Transactions

More examples of write skew

Write skew may seem like an esoteric issue at first, but once you’re aware of it, you

may notice more situations in which it can occur. Here are some more examples:

Meeting room booking system

Say you want to enforce that there cannot be two bookings for the same meeting

room at the same time [43]. When someone wants to make a booking, you first

check for any conflicting bookings (i.e., bookings for the same room with an

overlapping time range), and if none are found, you create the meeting (see

Example 7-2).ix

Example 7-2. A meeting room booking system tries to avoid double-booking (not

safe under snapshot isolation)

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

-- Check for any existing bookings that overlap with the period of noon-1pm

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM bookings

WHERE room_id = 123 AND

end_time > '2015-01-01 12:00' AND start_time < '2015-01-01 13:00';

-- If the previous query returned zero:

INSERT INTO bookings

(room_id, start_time, end_time, user_id)

VALUES (123, '2015-01-01 12:00', '2015-01-01 13:00', 666);

COMMIT;

Unfortunately, snapshot isolation does not prevent another user from concur‐

rently inserting a conflicting meeting. In order to guarantee you won’t get sched‐

uling conflicts, you once again need serializable isolation.

Multiplayer game

In Example 7-1, we used a lock to prevent lost updates (that is, making sure that

two players can’t move the same figure at the same time). However, the lock

doesn’t prevent players from moving two different figures to the same position

on the board or potentially making some other move that violates the rules of the

game. Depending on the kind of rule you are enforcing, you might be able to use

a unique constraint, but otherwise you’re vulnerable to write skew.

ix. In PostgreSQL you can do this more elegantly using range types, but they are not widely supported in

other databases.

Weak Isolation Levels | 249

Claiming a username

On a website where each user has a unique username, two users may try to create

accounts with the same username at the same time. You may use a transaction to

check whether a name is taken and, if not, create an account with that name.

However, like in the previous examples, that is not safe under snapshot isolation.

Fortunately, a unique constraint is a simple solution here (the second transaction

that tries to register the username will be aborted due to violating the constraint).

Preventing double-spending

A service that allows users to spend money or points needs to check that a user

doesn’t spend more than they have. You might implement this by inserting a ten‐

tative spending item into a user’s account, listing all the items in the account, and

checking that the sum is positive [44]. With write skew, it could happen that two

spending items are inserted concurrently that together cause the balance to go

negative, but that neither transaction notices the other.

Phantoms causing write skew

All of these examples follow a similar pattern:

1. A SELECT query checks whether some requirement is satisfied by searching for

rows that match some search condition (there are at least two doctors on call,

there are no existing bookings for that room at that time, the position on the

board doesn’t already have another figure on it, the username isn’t already taken,

there is still money in the account).

2. Depending on the result of the first query, the application code decides how to

continue (perhaps to go ahead with the operation, or perhaps to report an error

to the user and abort).

3. If the application decides to go ahead, it makes a write (INSERT, UPDATE, or

DELETE) to the database and commits the transaction.

The effect of this write changes the precondition of the decision of step 2. In

other words, if you were to repeat the SELECT query from step 1 after commiting

the write, you would get a different result, because the write changed the set of

rows matching the search condition (there is now one fewer doctor on call, the

meeting room is now booked for that time, the position on the board is now

taken by the figure that was moved, the username is now taken, there is now less

money in the account).

The steps may occur in a different order. For example, you could first make the write,

then the SELECT query, and finally decide whether to abort or commit based on the

result of the query.

250 | Chapter 7: Transactions

In the case of the doctor on call example, the row being modified in step 3 was one of

the rows returned in step 1, so we could make the transaction safe and avoid write

skew by locking the rows in step 1 (SELECT FOR UPDATE). However, the other four

examples are different: they check for the absence of rows matching some search con‐

dition, and the write adds a row matching the same condition. If the query in step 1

doesn’t return any rows, SELECT FOR UPDATE can’t attach locks to anything.

This effect, where a write in one transaction changes the result of a search query in

another transaction, is called a phantom [3]. Snapshot isolation avoids phantoms in read-only queries, but in read-write transactions like the examples we discussed, phantoms can lead to particularly tricky cases of write skew.

Materializing conflicts

If the problem of phantoms is that there is no object to which we can attach the locks,

perhaps we can artificially introduce a lock object into the database?

For example, in the meeting room booking case you could imagine creating a table of

time slots and rooms. Each row in this table corresponds to a particular room for a

particular time period (say, 15 minutes). You create rows for all possible combina‐

tions of rooms and time periods ahead of time, e.g. for the next six months.

Now a transaction that wants to create a booking can lock (SELECT FOR UPDATE) the

rows in the table that correspond to the desired room and time period. After it has

acquired the locks, it can check for overlapping bookings and insert a new booking as

before. Note that the additional table isn’t used to store information about the book‐

ing—it’s purely a collection of locks which is used to prevent bookings on the same

room and time range from being modified concurrently.

This approach is called materializing conflicts, because it takes a phantom and turns it

into a lock conflict on a concrete set of rows that exist in the database [11]. Unfortunately, it can be hard and error-prone to figure out how to materialize conflicts, and it’s ugly to let a concurrency control mechanism leak into the application data model.

For those reasons, materializing conflicts should be considered a last resort if no

alternative is possible. A serializable isolation level is much preferable in most cases.

Serializability

In this chapter we have seen several examples of transactions that are prone to race

conditions. Some race conditions are prevented by the read committed and snapshot

isolation levels, but others are not. We encountered some particularly tricky exam‐

ples with write skew and phantoms. It’s a sad situation:

• Isolation levels are hard to understand, and inconsistently implemented in differ‐

ent databases (e.g., the meaning of “repeatable read” varies significantly).

Serializability | 251

• If you look at your application code, it’s difficult to tell whether it is safe to run at a particular isolation level—especially in a large application, where you might not be aware of all the things that may be happening concurrently.

• There are no good tools to help us detect race conditions. In principle, static

analysis may help [26], but research techniques have not yet found their way into

practical use. Testing for concurrency issues is hard, because they are usually

nondeterministic—problems only occur if you get unlucky with the timing.

This is not a new problem—it has been like this since the 1970s, when weak isolation

levels were first introduced [2]. All along, the answer from researchers has been sim‐

ple: use serializable isolation!

Serializable isolation is usually regarded as the strongest isolation level. It guarantees

that even though transactions may execute in parallel, the end result is the same as if

they had executed one at a time, serially, without any concurrency. Thus, the database

guarantees that if the transactions behave correctly when run individually, they con‐

tinue to be correct when run concurrently—in other words, the database prevents all

possible race conditions.

But if serializable isolation is so much better than the mess of weak isolation levels,

then why isn’t everyone using it? To answer this question, we need to look at the

options for implementing serializability, and how they perform. Most databases that

provide serializability today use one of three techniques, which we will explore in the

rest of this chapter:

• Literally executing transactions in a serial order (see “Actual Serial Execution” on

page 252)

• Two-phase locking (see “Two-Phase Locking (2PL)” on page 257), which for sev‐

eral decades was the only viable option

• Optimistic concurrency control techniques such as serializable snapshot isolation

(see “Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)” on page 261)

For now, we will discuss these techniques primarily in the context of single-node

databases; in Chapter 9 we will examine how they can be generalized to transactions

that involve multiple nodes in a distributed system.

Actual Serial Execution

The simplest way of avoiding concurrency problems is to remove the concurrency

entirely: to execute only one transaction at a time, in serial order, on a single thread.

By doing so, we completely sidestep the problem of detecting and preventing con‐

flicts between transactions: the resulting isolation is by definition serializable.

252 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Even though this seems like an obvious idea, database designers only fairly recently—

around 2007—decided that a single-threaded loop for executing transactions was fea‐

sible [45]. If multi-threaded concurrency was considered essential for getting good

performance during the previous 30 years, what changed to make single-threaded

execution possible?

Two developments caused this rethink:

• RAM became cheap enough that for many use cases is now feasible to keep the

entire active dataset in memory (see “Keeping everything in memory” on page

88). When all data that a transaction needs to access is in memory, transactions

can execute much faster than if they have to wait for data to be loaded from disk.

• Database designers realized that OLTP transactions are usually short and only

make a small number of reads and writes (see “Transaction Processing or Ana‐

lytics?” on page 90). By contrast, long-running analytic queries are typically read-

only, so they can be run on a consistent snapshot (using snapshot isolation)

outside of the serial execution loop.

The approach of executing transactions serially is implemented in VoltDB/H-Store,

Redis, and Datomic [46, 47, 48]. A system designed for single-threaded execution can sometimes perform better than a system that supports concurrency, because it can avoid the coordination overhead of locking. However, its throughput is limited to

that of a single CPU core. In order to make the most of that single thread, transac‐

tions need to be structured differently from their traditional form.

Encapsulating transactions in stored procedures

In the early days of databases, the intention was that a database transaction could

encompass an entire flow of user activity. For example, booking an airline ticket is a

multi-stage process (searching for routes, fares, and available seats; deciding on an

itinerary; booking seats on each of the flights of the itinerary; entering passenger

details; making payment). Database designers thought that it would be neat if that

entire process was one transaction so that it could be committed atomically.

Unfortunately, humans are very slow to make up their minds and respond. If a data‐

base transaction needs to wait for input from a user, the database needs to support a

potentially huge number of concurrent transactions, most of them idle. Most data‐

bases cannot do that efficiently, and so almost all OLTP applications keep transac‐

tions short by avoiding interactively waiting for a user within a transaction. On the

web, this means that a transaction is committed within the same HTTP request—a

transaction does not span multiple requests. A new HTTP request starts a new trans‐

action.

Even though the human has been taken out of the critical path, transactions have

continued to be executed in an interactive client/server style, one statement at a time.

Serializability | 253

An application makes a query, reads the result, perhaps makes another query

depending on the result of the first query, and so on. The queries and results are sent

back and forth between the application code (running on one machine) and the data‐

base server (on another machine).

In this interactive style of transaction, a lot of time is spent in network communica‐

tion between the application and the database. If you were to disallow concurrency in

the database and only process one transaction at a time, the throughput would be

dreadful because the database would spend most of its time waiting for the applica‐

tion to issue the next query for the current transaction. In this kind of database, it’s

necessary to process multiple transactions concurrently in order to get reasonable

performance.

For this reason, systems with single-threaded serial transaction processing don’t

allow interactive multi-statement transactions. Instead, the application must submit

the entire transaction code to the database ahead of time, as a stored procedure. The

differences between these approaches is illustrated in Figure 7-9. Provided that all

data required by a transaction is in memory, the stored procedure can execute very

fast, without waiting for any network or disk I/O.

Figure 7-9. The difference between an interactive transaction and a stored procedure

(using the example transaction of Figure 7-8 ).

254 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Pros and cons of stored procedures

Stored procedures have existed for some time in relational databases, and they have

been part of the SQL standard (SQL/PSM) since 1999. They have gained a somewhat

bad reputation, for various reasons:

• Each database vendor has its own language for stored procedures (Oracle has PL/

SQL, SQL Server has T-SQL, PostgreSQL has PL/pgSQL, etc.). These languages

haven’t kept up with developments in general-purpose programming languages,

so they look quite ugly and archaic from today’s point of view, and they lack the

ecosystem of libraries that you find with most programming languages.

• Code running in a database is difficult to manage: compared to an application

server, it’s harder to debug, more awkward to keep in version control and deploy,

trickier to test, and difficult to integrate with a metrics collection system for

monitoring.

• A database is often much more performance-sensitive than an application server,

because a single database instance is often shared by many application servers. A

badly written stored procedure (e.g., using a lot of memory or CPU time) in a

database can cause much more trouble than equivalent badly written code in an

application server.

However, those issues can be overcome. Modern implementations of stored proce‐

dures have abandoned PL/SQL and use existing general-purpose programming lan‐

guages instead: VoltDB uses Java or Groovy, Datomic uses Java or Clojure, and Redis

uses Lua.

With stored procedures and in-memory data, executing all transactions on a single

thread becomes feasible. As they don’t need to wait for I/O and they avoid the over‐

head of other concurrency control mechanisms, they can achieve quite good

throughput on a single thread.

VoltDB also uses stored procedures for replication: instead of copying a transaction’s

writes from one node to another, it executes the same stored procedure on each rep‐

lica. VoltDB therefore requires that stored procedures are deterministic (when run on

different nodes, they must produce the same result). If a transaction needs to use the

current date and time, for example, it must do so through special deterministic APIs.

Partitioning

Executing all transactions serially makes concurrency control much simpler, but lim‐

its the transaction throughput of the database to the speed of a single CPU core on a

single machine. Read-only transactions may execute elsewhere, using snapshot isola‐

tion, but for applications with high write throughput, the single-threaded transaction

processor can become a serious bottleneck.

Serializability | 255

In order to scale to multiple CPU cores, and multiple nodes, you can potentially par‐

tition your data (see Chapter 6), which is supported in VoltDB. If you can find a way

of partitioning your dataset so that each transaction only needs to read and write data

within a single partition, then each partition can have its own transaction processing

thread running independently from the others. In this case, you can give each CPU

core its own partition, which allows your transaction throughput to scale linearly

with the number of CPU cores [47].

However, for any transaction that needs to access multiple partitions, the database

must coordinate the transaction across all the partitions that it touches. The stored

procedure needs to be performed in lock-step across all partitions to ensure serializa‐

bility across the whole system.

Since cross-partition transactions have additional coordination overhead, they are

vastly slower than single-partition transactions. VoltDB reports a throughput of

about 1,000 cross-partition writes per second, which is orders of magnitude below its

single-partition throughput and cannot be increased by adding more machines [49].

Whether transactions can be single-partition depends very much on the structure of

the data used by the application. Simple key-value data can often be partitioned very

easily, but data with multiple secondary indexes is likely to require a lot of cross-

partition coordination (see “Partitioning and Secondary Indexes” on page 206).

Summary of serial execution

Serial execution of transactions has become a viable way of achieving serializable iso‐

lation within certain constraints:

• Every transaction must be small and fast, because it takes only one slow transac‐

tion to stall all transaction processing.

• It is limited to use cases where the active dataset can fit in memory. Rarely

accessed data could potentially be moved to disk, but if it needed to be accessed

in a single-threaded transaction, the system would get very slow.x

• Write throughput must be low enough to be handled on a single CPU core, or

else transactions need to be partitioned without requiring cross-partition coordi‐

nation.

• Cross-partition transactions are possible, but there is a hard limit to the extent to

which they can be used.

x. If a transaction needs to access data that’s not in memory, the best solution may be to abort the transaction, asynchronously fetch the data into memory while continuing to process other transactions, and then restart the transaction when the data has been loaded. This approach is known as anti-caching, as previously mentioned in “Keeping everything in memory” on page 88.

256 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Two-Phase Locking (2PL)

For around 30 years, there was only one widely used algorithm for serializability in

databases: two-phase locking (2PL).xi

2PL is not 2PC

Note that while two-phase locking (2PL) sounds very similar to

two-phase commit (2PC), they are completely different things. We

will discuss 2PC in Chapter 9.

We saw previously that locks are often used to prevent dirty writes (see “No dirty

writes” on page 235): if two transactions concurrently try to write to the same object, the lock ensures that the second writer must wait until the first one has finished its transaction (aborted or committed) before it may continue.

Two-phase locking is similar, but makes the lock requirements much stronger. Sev‐

eral transactions are allowed to concurrently read the same object as long as nobody

is writing to it. But as soon as anyone wants to write (modify or delete) an object,

exclusive access is required:

• If transaction A has read an object and transaction B wants to write to that

object, B must wait until A commits or aborts before it can continue. (This

ensures that B can’t change the object unexpectedly behind A’s back.)

• If transaction A has written an object and transaction B wants to read that object,

B must wait until A commits or aborts before it can continue. (Reading an old

version of the object, like in Figure 7-1, is not acceptable under 2PL.)

In 2PL, writers don’t just block other writers; they also block readers and vice versa.

Snapshot isolation has the mantra readers never block writers, and writers never block

readers (see “Implementing snapshot isolation” on page 239), which captures this key difference between snapshot isolation and two-phase locking. On the other hand, because 2PL provides serializability, it protects against all the race conditions dis‐

cussed earlier, including lost updates and write skew.

Implementation of two-phase locking

2PL is used by the serializable isolation level in MySQL (InnoDB) and SQL Server,

and the repeatable read isolation level in DB2 [23, 36].

xi. Sometimes called strong strict two-phase locking (SS2PL) to distinguish it from other variants of 2PL.

Serializability | 257

The blocking of readers and writers is implemented by a having a lock on each object

in the database. The lock can either be in shared mode or in exclusive mode. The lock

is used as follows:

• If a transaction wants to read an object, it must first acquire the lock in shared

mode. Several transactions are allowed to hold the lock in shared mode simulta‐

neously, but if another transaction already has an exclusive lock on the object,

these transactions must wait.

• If a transaction wants to write to an object, it must first acquire the lock in exclu‐

sive mode. No other transaction may hold the lock at the same time (either in

shared or in exclusive mode), so if there is any existing lock on the object, the

transaction must wait.

• If a transaction first reads and then writes an object, it may upgrade its shared

lock to an exclusive lock. The upgrade works the same as getting an exclusive

lock directly.

• After a transaction has acquired the lock, it must continue to hold the lock until

the end of the transaction (commit or abort). This is where the name “two-

phase” comes from: the first phase (while the transaction is executing) is when

the locks are acquired, and the second phase (at the end of the transaction) is

when all the locks are released.

Since so many locks are in use, it can happen quite easily that transaction A is stuck

waiting for transaction B to release its lock, and vice versa. This situation is called

deadlock. The database automatically detects deadlocks between transactions and

aborts one of them so that the others can make progress. The aborted transaction

needs to be retried by the application.

Performance of two-phase locking

The big downside of two-phase locking, and the reason why it hasn’t been used by

everybody since the 1970s, is performance: transaction throughput and response

times of queries are significantly worse under two-phase locking than under weak

isolation.

This is partly due to the overhead of acquiring and releasing all those locks, but more

importantly due to reduced concurrency. By design, if two concurrent transactions

try to do anything that may in any way result in a race condition, one has to wait for

the other to complete.

Traditional relational databases don’t limit the duration of a transaction, because

they are designed for interactive applications that wait for human input. Conse‐

quently, when one transaction has to wait on another, there is no limit on how long it

may have to wait. Even if you make sure that you keep all your transactions short, a

258 | Chapter 7: Transactions

queue may form if several transactions want to access the same object, so a transac‐

tion may have to wait for several others to complete before it can do anything.

For this reason, databases running 2PL can have quite unstable latencies, and they

can be very slow at high percentiles (see “Describing Performance” on page 13) if

there is contention in the workload. It may take just one slow transaction, or one

transaction that accesses a lot of data and acquires many locks, to cause the rest of the

system to grind to a halt. This instability is problematic when robust operation is

required.

Although deadlocks can happen with the lock-based read committed isolation level,

they occur much more frequently under 2PL serializable isolation (depending on the

access patterns of your transaction). This can be an additional performance problem:

when a transaction is aborted due to deadlock and is retried, it needs to do its work

all over again. If deadlocks are frequent, this can mean significant wasted effort.

Predicate locks

In the preceding description of locks, we glossed over a subtle but important detail.

In “Phantoms causing write skew” on page 250 we discussed the problem of phan‐

toms—that is, one transaction changing the results of another transaction’s search

query. A database with serializable isolation must prevent phantoms.

In the meeting room booking example this means that if one transaction has

searched for existing bookings for a room within a certain time window (see

Example 7-2), another transaction is not allowed to concurrently insert or update

another booking for the same room and time range. (It’s okay to concurrently insert

bookings for other rooms, or for the same room at a different time that doesn’t affect

the proposed booking.)

How do we implement this? Conceptually, we need a predicate lock [3]. It works similarly to the shared/exclusive lock described earlier, but rather than belonging to a particular object (e.g., one row in a table), it belongs to all objects that match some

search condition, such as:

SELECT * FROM bookings

WHERE room_id = 123 AND

end_time > '2018-01-01 12:00' AND

start_time < '2018-01-01 13:00';

A predicate lock restricts access as follows:

• If transaction A wants to read objects matching some condition, like in that

SELECT query, it must acquire a shared-mode predicate lock on the conditions of

the query. If another transaction B currently has an exclusive lock on any object

matching those conditions, A must wait until B releases its lock before it is

allowed to make its query.

Serializability | 259

• If transaction A wants to insert, update, or delete any object, it must first check

whether either the old or the new value matches any existing predicate lock. If

there is a matching predicate lock held by transaction B, then A must wait until B

has committed or aborted before it can continue.

The key idea here is that a predicate lock applies even to objects that do not yet exist

in the database, but which might be added in the future (phantoms). If two-phase

locking includes predicate locks, the database prevents all forms of write skew and

other race conditions, and so its isolation becomes serializable.

Index-range locks

Unfortunately, predicate locks do not perform well: if there are many locks by active

transactions, checking for matching locks becomes time-consuming. For that reason,

most databases with 2PL actually implement index-range locking (also known as next-

key locking), which is a simplified approximation of predicate locking [41, 50].

It’s safe to simplify a predicate by making it match a greater set of objects. For exam‐

ple, if you have a predicate lock for bookings of room 123 between noon and 1 p.m.,

you can approximate it by locking bookings for room 123 at any time, or you can

approximate it by locking all rooms (not just room 123) between noon and 1 p.m.

This is safe, because any write that matches the original predicate will definitely also

match the approximations.

In the room bookings database you would probably have an index on the room_id

column, and/or indexes on start_time and end_time (otherwise the preceding query

would be very slow on a large database):

• Say your index is on room_id, and the database uses this index to find existing

bookings for room 123. Now the database can simply attach a shared lock to this

index entry, indicating that a transaction has searched for bookings of room 123.

• Alternatively, if the database uses a time-based index to find existing bookings, it

can attach a shared lock to a range of values in that index, indicating that a trans‐

action has searched for bookings that overlap with the time period of noon to 1

p.m. on January 1, 2018.

Either way, an approximation of the search condition is attached to one of the

indexes. Now, if another transaction wants to insert, update, or delete a booking for

the same room and/or an overlapping time period, it will have to update the same

part of the index. In the process of doing so, it will encounter the shared lock, and it

will be forced to wait until the lock is released.

This provides effective protection against phantoms and write skew. Index-range

locks are not as precise as predicate locks would be (they may lock a bigger range of

260 | Chapter 7: Transactions

objects than is strictly necessary to maintain serializability), but since they have much

lower overheads, they are a good compromise.

If there is no suitable index where a range lock can be attached, the database can fall

back to a shared lock on the entire table. This will not be good for performance, since

it will stop all other transactions writing to the table, but it’s a safe fallback position.

Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)

This chapter has painted a bleak picture of concurrency control in databases. On the

one hand, we have implementations of serializability that don’t perform well (two-

phase locking) or don’t scale well (serial execution). On the other hand, we have weak

isolation levels that have good performance, but are prone to various race conditions

(lost updates, write skew, phantoms, etc.). Are serializable isolation and good perfor‐

mance fundamentally at odds with each other?

Perhaps not: an algorithm called serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) is very promis‐

ing. It provides full serializability, but has only a small performance penalty com‐

pared to snapshot isolation. SSI is fairly new: it was first described in 2008 [40] and is

the subject of Michael Cahill’s PhD thesis [51].

Today SSI is used both in single-node databases (the serializable isolation level in

PostgreSQL since version 9.1 [41]) and distributed databases (FoundationDB uses a

similar algorithm). As SSI is so young compared to other concurrency control mech‐

anisms, it is still proving its performance in practice, but it has the possibility of being

fast enough to become the new default in the future.

Pessimistic versus optimistic concurrency control

Two-phase locking is a so-called pessimistic concurrency control mechanism: it is

based on the principle that if anything might possibly go wrong (as indicated by a

lock held by another transaction), it’s better to wait until the situation is safe again

before doing anything. It is like mutual exclusion, which is used to protect data struc‐

tures in multi-threaded programming.

Serial execution is, in a sense, pessimistic to the extreme: it is essentially equivalent to

each transaction having an exclusive lock on the entire database (or one partition of

the database) for the duration of the transaction. We compensate for the pessimism

by making each transaction very fast to execute, so it only needs to hold the “lock” for

a short time.

By contrast, serializable snapshot isolation is an optimistic concurrency control tech‐

nique. Optimistic in this context means that instead of blocking if something poten‐

tially dangerous happens, transactions continue anyway, in the hope that everything

will turn out all right. When a transaction wants to commit, the database checks

whether anything bad happened (i.e., whether isolation was violated); if so, the trans‐

Serializability | 261

action is aborted and has to be retried. Only transactions that executed serializably

are allowed to commit.

Optimistic concurrency control is an old idea [52], and its advantages and disadvan‐

tages have been debated for a long time [53]. It performs badly if there is high con‐

tention (many transactions trying to access the same objects), as this leads to a high

proportion of transactions needing to abort. If the system is already close to its maxi‐

mum throughput, the additional transaction load from retried transactions can make

performance worse.

However, if there is enough spare capacity, and if contention between transactions is

not too high, optimistic concurrency control techniques tend to perform better than

pessimistic ones. Contention can be reduced with commutative atomic operations:

for example, if several transactions concurrently want to increment a counter, it

doesn’t matter in which order the increments are applied (as long as the counter isn’t

read in the same transaction), so the concurrent increments can all be applied

without conflicting.

As the name suggests, SSI is based on snapshot isolation—that is, all reads within a

transaction are made from a consistent snapshot of the database (see “Snapshot Isola‐

tion and Repeatable Read” on page 237). This is the main difference compared to ear‐

lier optimistic concurrency control techniques. On top of snapshot isolation, SSI adds

an algorithm for detecting serialization conflicts among writes and determining

which transactions to abort.

Decisions based on an outdated premise

When we previously discussed write skew in snapshot isolation (see “Write Skew and

Phantoms” on page 246), we observed a recurring pattern: a transaction reads some

data from the database, examines the result of the query, and decides to take some

action (write to the database) based on the result that it saw. However, under snap‐

shot isolation, the result from the original query may no longer be up-to-date by the

time the transaction commits, because the data may have been modified in the mean‐

time.

Put another way, the transaction is taking an action based on a premise (a fact that

was true at the beginning of the transaction, e.g., “There are currently two doctors on

call”). Later, when the transaction wants to commit, the original data may have

changed—the premise may no longer be true.

When the application makes a query (e.g., “How many doctors are currently on

call?”), the database doesn’t know how the application logic uses the result of that

query. To be safe, the database needs to assume that any change in the query result

(the premise) means that writes in that transaction may be invalid. In other words,

there may be a causal dependency between the queries and the writes in the transac‐

tion. In order to provide serializable isolation, the database must detect situations in

262 | Chapter 7: Transactions

which a transaction may have acted on an outdated premise and abort the transac‐

tion in that case.

How does the database know if a query result might have changed? There are two

cases to consider:

• Detecting reads of a stale MVCC object version (uncommitted write occurred

before the read)

• Detecting writes that affect prior reads (the write occurs after the read)

Detecting stale MVCC reads

Recall that snapshot isolation is usually implemented by multi-version concurrency

control (MVCC; see Figure 7-10). When a transaction reads from a consistent snap‐

shot in an MVCC database, it ignores writes that were made by any other transac‐

tions that hadn’t yet committed at the time when the snapshot was taken. In

Figure 7-10, transaction 43 sees Alice as having on_call = true, because transaction

42 (which modified Alice’s on-call status) is uncommitted. However, by the time

transaction 43 wants to commit, transaction 42 has already committed. This means

that the write that was ignored when reading from the consistent snapshot has now

taken effect, and transaction 43’s premise is no longer true.

Figure 7-10. Detecting when a transaction reads outdated values from an MVCC

snapshot.

Serializability | 263

In order to prevent this anomaly, the database needs to track when a transaction

ignores another transaction’s writes due to MVCC visibility rules. When the transac‐

tion wants to commit, the database checks whether any of the ignored writes have

now been committed. If so, the transaction must be aborted.

Why wait until committing? Why not abort transaction 43 immediately when the

stale read is detected? Well, if transaction 43 was a read-only transaction, it wouldn’t

need to be aborted, because there is no risk of write skew. At the time when transac‐

tion 43 makes its read, the database doesn’t yet know whether that transaction is

going to later perform a write. Moreover, transaction 42 may yet abort or may still be

uncommitted at the time when transaction 43 is committed, and so the read may

turn out not to have been stale after all. By avoiding unnecessary aborts, SSI preserves

snapshot isolation’s support for long-running reads from a consistent snapshot.

Detecting writes that affect prior reads

The second case to consider is when another transaction modifies data after it has

been read. This case is illustrated in Figure 7-11.

Figure 7-11. In serializable snapshot isolation, detecting when one transaction modifies

another transaction’s reads.

In the context of two-phase locking we discussed index-range locks (see “Index-range

locks” on page 260), which allow the database to lock access to all rows matching

some search query, such as WHERE shift_id = 1234. We can use a similar technique

here, except that SSI locks don’t block other transactions.

264 | Chapter 7: Transactions

In Figure 7-11, transactions 42 and 43 both search for on-call doctors during shift 1234. If there is an index on shift_id, the database can use the index entry 1234 to record the fact that transactions 42 and 43 read this data. (If there is no index, this

information can be tracked at the table level.) This information only needs to be kept

for a while: after a transaction has finished (committed or aborted), and all concur‐

rent transactions have finished, the database can forget what data it read.

When a transaction writes to the database, it must look in the indexes for any other

transactions that have recently read the affected data. This process is similar to

acquiring a write lock on the affected key range, but rather than blocking until the

readers have committed, the lock acts as a tripwire: it simply notifies the transactions

that the data they read may no longer be up to date.

In Figure 7-11, transaction 43 notifies transaction 42 that its prior read is outdated,

and vice versa. Transaction 42 is first to commit, and it is successful: although trans‐

action 43’s write affected 42, 43 hasn’t yet committed, so the write has not yet taken

effect. However, when transaction 43 wants to commit, the conflicting write from 42

has already been committed, so 43 must abort.

Performance of serializable snapshot isolation

As always, many engineering details affect how well an algorithm works in practice.

For example, one trade-off is the granularity at which transactions’ reads and writes

are tracked. If the database keeps track of each transaction’s activity in great detail, it

can be precise about which transactions need to abort, but the bookkeeping overhead

can become significant. Less detailed tracking is faster, but may lead to more transac‐

tions being aborted than strictly necessary.

In some cases, it’s okay for a transaction to read information that was overwritten by

another transaction: depending on what else happened, it’s sometimes possible to

prove that the result of the execution is nevertheless serializable. PostgreSQL uses this

theory to reduce the number of unnecessary aborts [11, 41].

Compared to two-phase locking, the big advantage of serializable snapshot isolation

is that one transaction doesn’t need to block waiting for locks held by another trans‐

action. Like under snapshot isolation, writers don’t block readers, and vice versa. This

design principle makes query latency much more predictable and less variable. In

particular, read-only queries can run on a consistent snapshot without requiring any

locks, which is very appealing for read-heavy workloads.

Compared to serial execution, serializable snapshot isolation is not limited to the

throughput of a single CPU core: FoundationDB distributes the detection of seriali‐

zation conflicts across multiple machines, allowing it to scale to very high through‐

put. Even though data may be partitioned across multiple machines, transactions can

read and write data in multiple partitions while ensuring serializable isolation [54].

Serializability | 265

The rate of aborts significantly affects the overall performance of SSI. For example, a

transaction that reads and writes data over a long period of time is likely to run into

conflicts and abort, so SSI requires that read-write transactions be fairly short (long-

running read-only transactions may be okay). However, SSI is probably less sensitive

to slow transactions than two-phase locking or serial execution.

Summary

Transactions are an abstraction layer that allows an application to pretend that cer‐

tain concurrency problems and certain kinds of hardware and software faults don’t

exist. A large class of errors is reduced down to a simple transaction abort, and the

application just needs to try again.

In this chapter we saw many examples of problems that transactions help prevent.

Not all applications are susceptible to all those problems: an application with very

simple access patterns, such as reading and writing only a single record, can probably

manage without transactions. However, for more complex access patterns, transac‐

tions can hugely reduce the number of potential error cases you need to think about.

Without transactions, various error scenarios (processes crashing, network interrup‐

tions, power outages, disk full, unexpected concurrency, etc.) mean that data can

become inconsistent in various ways. For example, denormalized data can easily go

out of sync with the source data. Without transactions, it becomes very difficult to

reason about the effects that complex interacting accesses can have on the database.

In this chapter, we went particularly deep into the topic of concurrency control. We

discussed several widely used isolation levels, in particular read committed, snapshot

isolation (sometimes called repeatable read), and serializable. We characterized those isolation levels by discussing various examples of race conditions: Dirty reads

One client reads another client’s writes before they have been committed. The

read committed isolation level and stronger levels prevent dirty reads.

Dirty writes

One client overwrites data that another client has written, but not yet committed.

Almost all transaction implementations prevent dirty writes.

Read skew (nonrepeatable reads)

A client sees different parts of the database at different points in time. This issue

is most commonly prevented with snapshot isolation, which allows a transaction

to read from a consistent snapshot at one point in time. It is usually implemented

with multi-version concurrency control (MVCC).

266 | Chapter 7: Transactions

Lost updates

Two clients concurrently perform a read-modify-write cycle. One overwrites the

other’s write without incorporating its changes, so data is lost. Some implemen‐

tations of snapshot isolation prevent this anomaly automatically, while others

require a manual lock (SELECT FOR UPDATE).

Write skew

A transaction reads something, makes a decision based on the value it saw, and

writes the decision to the database. However, by the time the write is made, the

premise of the decision is no longer true. Only serializable isolation prevents this

anomaly.

Phantom reads

A transaction reads objects that match some search condition. Another client

makes a write that affects the results of that search. Snapshot isolation prevents

straightforward phantom reads, but phantoms in the context of write skew

require special treatment, such as index-range locks.

Weak isolation levels protect against some of those anomalies but leave you, the

application developer, to handle others manually (e.g., using explicit locking). Only

serializable isolation protects against all of these issues. We discussed three different

approaches to implementing serializable transactions:

Literally executing transactions in a serial order

If you can make each transaction very fast to execute, and the transaction

throughput is low enough to process on a single CPU core, this is a simple and

effective option.

Two-phase locking

For decades this has been the standard way of implementing serializability, but

many applications avoid using it because of its performance characteristics.

Serializable snapshot isolation (SSI)

A fairly new algorithm that avoids most of the downsides of the previous

approaches. It uses an optimistic approach, allowing transactions to proceed

without blocking. When a transaction wants to commit, it is checked, and it is

aborted if the execution was not serializable.

The examples in this chapter used a relational data model. However, as discussed in

“The need for multi-object transactions” on page 231, transactions are a valuable

database feature, no matter which data model is used.

In this chapter, we explored ideas and algorithms mostly in the context of a database

running on a single machine. Transactions in distributed databases open a new set of

difficult challenges, which we’ll discuss in the next two chapters.

Summary | 267

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Summary | 271

CHAPTER 8

The Trouble with Distributed Systems

Hey I just met you

The network’s laggy

But here’s my data

So store it maybe

—Kyle Kingsbury, Carly Rae Jepsen and the Perils of Network Partitions (2013)

A recurring theme in the last few chapters has been how systems handle things going

wrong. For example, we discussed replica failover (“Handling Node Outages” on

page 156), replication lag (“Problems with Replication Lag” on page 161), and concurrency control for transactions (“Weak Isolation Levels” on page 233). As we come

to understand various edge cases that can occur in real systems, we get better at han‐

dling them.

However, even though we have talked a lot about faults, the last few chapters have

still been too optimistic. The reality is even darker. We will now turn our pessimism

to the maximum and assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.i (Expe‐

rienced systems operators will tell you that is a reasonable assumption. If you ask

nicely, they might tell you some frightening stories while nursing their scars of past

battles.)

Working with distributed systems is fundamentally different from writing software

on a single computer—and the main difference is that there are lots of new and excit‐

ing ways for things to go wrong [1, 2]. In this chapter, we will get a taste of the problems that arise in practice, and an understanding of the things we can and cannot rely on.

i. With one exception: we will assume that faults are non-Byzantine (see “Byzantine Faults” on page 304).

273

In the end, our task as engineers is to build systems that do their job (i.e., meet the

guarantees that users are expecting), in spite of everything going wrong. In Chapter 9, we will look at some examples of algorithms that can provide such guarantees in a distributed system. But first, in this chapter, we must understand what challenges we

are up against.

This chapter is a thoroughly pessimistic and depressing overview of things that may

go wrong in a distributed system. We will look into problems with networks (“Unre‐

liable Networks” on page 277); clocks and timing issues (“Unreliable Clocks” on page

287); and we’ll discuss to what degree they are avoidable. The consequences of all

these issues are disorienting, so we’ll explore how to think about the state of a dis‐

tributed system and how to reason about things that have happened (“Knowledge,

Truth, and Lies” on page 300).

Faults and Partial Failures

When you are writing a program on a single computer, it normally behaves in a fairly

predictable way: either it works or it doesn’t. Buggy software may give the appearance

that the computer is sometimes “having a bad day” (a problem that is often fixed by a

reboot), but that is mostly just a consequence of badly written software.

There is no fundamental reason why software on a single computer should be flaky:

when the hardware is working correctly, the same operation always produces the

same result (it is deterministic). If there is a hardware problem (e.g., memory corrup‐

tion or a loose connector), the consequence is usually a total system failure (e.g., ker‐

nel panic, “blue screen of death,” failure to start up). An individual computer with

good software is usually either fully functional or entirely broken, but not something

in between.

This is a deliberate choice in the design of computers: if an internal fault occurs, we

prefer a computer to crash completely rather than returning a wrong result, because

wrong results are difficult and confusing to deal with. Thus, computers hide the fuzzy

physical reality on which they are implemented and present an idealized system

model that operates with mathematical perfection. A CPU instruction always does

the same thing; if you write some data to memory or disk, that data remains intact

and doesn’t get randomly corrupted. This design goal of always-correct computation

goes all the way back to the very first digital computer [3].

When you are writing software that runs on several computers, connected by a net‐

work, the situation is fundamentally different. In distributed systems, we are no

longer operating in an idealized system model—we have no choice but to confront

the messy reality of the physical world. And in the physical world, a remarkably wide

range of things can go wrong, as illustrated by this anecdote [4]:

274 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

In my limited experience I’ve dealt with long-lived network partitions in a single data

center (DC), PDU [power distribution unit] failures, switch failures, accidental power

cycles of whole racks, whole-DC backbone failures, whole-DC power failures, and a

hypoglycemic driver smashing his Ford pickup truck into a DC’s HVAC [heating, ven‐

tilation, and air conditioning] system. And I’m not even an ops guy.

—Coda Hale

In a distributed system, there may well be some parts of the system that are broken in

some unpredictable way, even though other parts of the system are working fine. This

is known as a partial failure. The difficulty is that partial failures are nondeterministic: if you try to do anything involving multiple nodes and the network, it may sometimes work and sometimes unpredictably fail. As we shall see, you may not even know

whether something succeeded or not, as the time it takes for a message to travel

across a network is also nondeterministic!

This nondeterminism and possibility of partial failures is what makes distributed sys‐

tems hard to work with [5].

Cloud Computing and Supercomputing

There is a spectrum of philosophies on how to build large-scale computing systems:

• At one end of the scale is the field of high-performance computing (HPC). Super‐

computers with thousands of CPUs are typically used for computationally inten‐

sive scientific computing tasks, such as weather forecasting or molecular

dynamics (simulating the movement of atoms and molecules).

• At the other extreme is cloud computing, which is not very well defined [6] but is often associated with multi-tenant datacenters, commodity computers connected with an IP network (often Ethernet), elastic/on-demand resource allocation, and

metered billing.

• Traditional enterprise datacenters lie somewhere between these extremes.

With these philosophies come very different approaches to handling faults. In a

supercomputer, a job typically checkpoints the state of its computation to durable

storage from time to time. If one node fails, a common solution is to simply stop the

entire cluster workload. After the faulty node is repaired, the computation is restarted

from the last checkpoint [7, 8]. Thus, a supercomputer is more like a single-node

computer than a distributed system: it deals with partial failure by letting it escalate

into total failure—if any part of the system fails, just let everything crash (like a kernel

panic on a single machine).

In this book we focus on systems for implementing internet services, which usually

look very different from supercomputers:

Faults and Partial Failures | 275

• Many internet-related applications are online, in the sense that they need to be able to serve users with low latency at any time. Making the service unavailable— for example, stopping the cluster for repair—is not acceptable. In contrast, off‐

line (batch) jobs like weather simulations can be stopped and restarted with fairly

low impact.

• Supercomputers are typically built from specialized hardware, where each node

is quite reliable, and nodes communicate through shared memory and remote

direct memory access (RDMA). On the other hand, nodes in cloud services are

built from commodity machines, which can provide equivalent performance at

lower cost due to economies of scale, but also have higher failure rates.

• Large datacenter networks are often based on IP and Ethernet, arranged in Clos

topologies to provide high bisection bandwidth [9]. Supercomputers often use

specialized network topologies, such as multi-dimensional meshes and toruses

[10], which yield better performance for HPC workloads with known communi‐

cation patterns.

• The bigger a system gets, the more likely it is that one of its components is bro‐

ken. Over time, broken things get fixed and new things break, but in a system

with thousands of nodes, it is reasonable to assume that something is always bro‐

ken [7]. When the error handling strategy consists of simply giving up, a large

system can end up spending a lot of its time recovering from faults rather than

doing useful work [8].

• If the system can tolerate failed nodes and still keep working as a whole, that is a

very useful feature for operations and maintenance: for example, you can per‐

form a rolling upgrade (see Chapter 4), restarting one node at a time, while the

service continues serving users without interruption. In cloud environments, if

one virtual machine is not performing well, you can just kill it and request a new

one (hoping that the new one will be faster).

• In a geographically distributed deployment (keeping data geographically close to

your users to reduce access latency), communication most likely goes over the

internet, which is slow and unreliable compared to local networks. Supercom‐

puters generally assume that all of their nodes are close together.

If we want to make distributed systems work, we must accept the possibility of partial

failure and build fault-tolerance mechanisms into the software. In other words, we

need to build a reliable system from unreliable components. (As discussed in “Relia‐

bility” on page 6, there is no such thing as perfect reliability, so we’ll need to under‐

stand the limits of what we can realistically promise.)

Even in smaller systems consisting of only a few nodes, it’s important to think about

partial failure. In a small system, it’s quite likely that most of the components are

working correctly most of the time. However, sooner or later, some part of the system

276 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

will become faulty, and the software will have to somehow handle it. The fault handling must be part of the software design, and you (as operator of the software) need to know what behavior to expect from the software in the case of a fault.

It would be unwise to assume that faults are rare and simply hope for the best. It is

important to consider a wide range of possible faults—even fairly unlikely ones—and

to artificially create such situations in your testing environment to see what happens.

In distributed systems, suspicion, pessimism, and paranoia pay off.

Building a Reliable System from Unreliable Components

You may wonder whether this makes any sense—intuitively it may seem like a system

can only be as reliable as its least reliable component (its weakest link). This is not the

case: in fact, it is an old idea in computing to construct a more reliable system from a

less reliable underlying base [11]. For example:

• Error-correcting codes allow digital data to be transmitted accurately across a

communication channel that occasionally gets some bits wrong, for example due

to radio interference on a wireless network [12].

• IP (the Internet Protocol) is unreliable: it may drop, delay, duplicate, or reorder

packets. TCP (the Transmission Control Protocol) provides a more reliable

transport layer on top of IP: it ensures that missing packets are retransmitted,

duplicates are eliminated, and packets are reassembled into the order in which

they were sent.

Although the system can be more reliable than its underlying parts, there is always a

limit to how much more reliable it can be. For example, error-correcting codes can

deal with a small number of single-bit errors, but if your signal is swamped by inter‐

ference, there is a fundamental limit to how much data you can get through your

communication channel [13]. TCP can hide packet loss, duplication, and reordering

from you, but it cannot magically remove delays in the network.

Although the more reliable higher-level system is not perfect, it’s still useful because it

takes care of some of the tricky low-level faults, and so the remaining faults are usu‐

ally easier to reason about and deal with. We will explore this matter further in “The

end-to-end argument” on page 519.

Unreliable Networks

As discussed in the introduction to Part II, the distributed systems we focus on in this book are shared-nothing systems: i.e., a bunch of machines connected by a network.

The network is the only way those machines can communicate—we assume that each

Unreliable Networks | 277

machine has its own memory and disk, and one machine cannot access another

machine’s memory or disk (except by making requests to a service over the network).

Shared-nothing is not the only way of building systems, but it has become the domi‐

nant approach for building internet services, for several reasons: it’s comparatively

cheap because it requires no special hardware, it can make use of commoditized

cloud computing services, and it can achieve high reliability through redundancy

across multiple geographically distributed datacenters.

The internet and most internal networks in datacenters (often Ethernet) are asyn‐

chronous packet networks. In this kind of network, one node can send a message (a

packet) to another node, but the network gives no guarantees as to when it will arrive,

or whether it will arrive at all. If you send a request and expect a response, many

things could go wrong (some of which are illustrated in Figure 8-1):

1. Your request may have been lost (perhaps someone unplugged a network cable).

2. Your request may be waiting in a queue and will be delivered later (perhaps the

network or the recipient is overloaded).

3. The remote node may have failed (perhaps it crashed or it was powered down).

4. The remote node may have temporarily stopped responding (perhaps it is expe‐

riencing a long garbage collection pause; see “Process Pauses” on page 295), but it

will start responding again later.

5. The remote node may have processed your request, but the response has been

lost on the network (perhaps a network switch has been misconfigured).

6. The remote node may have processed your request, but the response has been

delayed and will be delivered later (perhaps the network or your own machine is

overloaded).

Figure 8-1. If you send a request and don’t get a response, it’s not possible to distinguish

whether (a) the request was lost, (b) the remote node is down, or (c) the response was

lost.

278 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

The sender can’t even tell whether the packet was delivered: the only option is for the

recipient to send a response message, which may in turn be lost or delayed. These

issues are indistinguishable in an asynchronous network: the only information you

have is that you haven’t received a response yet. If you send a request to another node

and don’t receive a response, it is impossible to tell why.

The usual way of handling this issue is a timeout: after some time you give up waiting

and assume that the response is not going to arrive. However, when a timeout occurs,

you still don’t know whether the remote node got your request or not (and if the

request is still queued somewhere, it may still be delivered to the recipient, even if the

sender has given up on it).

Network Faults in Practice

We have been building computer networks for decades—one might hope that by now

we would have figured out how to make them reliable. However, it seems that we

have not yet succeeded.

There are some systematic studies, and plenty of anecdotal evidence, showing that

network problems can be surprisingly common, even in controlled environments like

a datacenter operated by one company [14]. One study in a medium-sized datacenter

found about 12 network faults per month, of which half disconnected a single

machine, and half disconnected an entire rack [15]. Another study measured the fail‐

ure rates of components like top-of-rack switches, aggregation switches, and load bal‐

ancers [16]. It found that adding redundant networking gear doesn’t reduce faults as

much as you might hope, since it doesn’t guard against human error (e.g., misconfig‐

ured switches), which is a major cause of outages.

Public cloud services such as EC2 are notorious for having frequent transient net‐

work glitches [14], and well-managed private datacenter networks can be stabler

environments. Nevertheless, nobody is immune from network problems: for exam‐

ple, a problem during a software upgrade for a switch could trigger a network topol‐

ogy reconfiguration, during which network packets could be delayed for more than a

minute [17]. Sharks might bite undersea cables and damage them [18]. Other surpris‐

ing faults include a network interface that sometimes drops all inbound packets but

sends outbound packets successfully [19]: just because a network link works in one

direction doesn’t guarantee it’s also working in the opposite direction.

Network partitions

When one part of the network is cut off from the rest due to a net‐

work fault, that is sometimes called a network partition or netsplit.

In this book we’ll generally stick with the more general term net‐

work fault, to avoid confusion with partitions (shards) of a storage

system, as discussed in Chapter 6.

Unreliable Networks | 279

Even if network faults are rare in your environment, the fact that faults can occur means that your software needs to be able to handle them. Whenever any communication happens over a network, it may fail—there is no way around it.

If the error handling of network faults is not defined and tested, arbitrarily bad things

could happen: for example, the cluster could become deadlocked and permanently

unable to serve requests, even when the network recovers [20], or it could even delete

all of your data [21]. If software is put in an unanticipated situation, it may do arbi‐

trary unexpected things.

Handling network faults doesn’t necessarily mean tolerating them: if your network is

normally fairly reliable, a valid approach may be to simply show an error message to

users while your network is experiencing problems. However, you do need to know

how your software reacts to network problems and ensure that the system can

recover from them. It may make sense to deliberately trigger network problems and

test the system’s response (this is the idea behind Chaos Monkey; see “Reliability” on

page 6).

Detecting Faults

Many systems need to automatically detect faulty nodes. For example:

• A load balancer needs to stop sending requests to a node that is dead (i.e., take it

out of rotation).

• In a distributed database with single-leader replication, if the leader fails, one of

the followers needs to be promoted to be the new leader (see “Handling Node

Outages” on page 156).

Unfortunately, the uncertainty about the network makes it difficult to tell whether a

node is working or not. In some specific circumstances you might get some feedback

to explicitly tell you that something is not working:

• If you can reach the machine on which the node should be running, but no pro‐

cess is listening on the destination port (e.g., because the process crashed), the

operating system will helpfully close or refuse TCP connections by sending a RST

or FIN packet in reply. However, if the node crashed while it was handling your

request, you have no way of knowing how much data was actually processed by

the remote node [22].

• If a node process crashed (or was killed by an administrator) but the node’s oper‐

ating system is still running, a script can notify other nodes about the crash so

that another node can take over quickly without having to wait for a timeout to

expire. For example, HBase does this [23].

280 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

• If you have access to the management interface of the network switches in your

datacenter, you can query them to detect link failures at a hardware level (e.g., if

the remote machine is powered down). This option is ruled out if you’re con‐

necting via the internet, or if you’re in a shared datacenter with no access to the

switches themselves, or if you can’t reach the management interface due to a net‐

work problem.

• If a router is sure that the IP address you’re trying to connect to is unreachable, it

may reply to you with an ICMP Destination Unreachable packet. However, the

router doesn’t have a magic failure detection capability either—it is subject to the

same limitations as other participants of the network.

Rapid feedback about a remote node being down is useful, but you can’t count on it.

Even if TCP acknowledges that a packet was delivered, the application may have

crashed before handling it. If you want to be sure that a request was successful, you

need a positive response from the application itself [24].

Conversely, if something has gone wrong, you may get an error response at some

level of the stack, but in general you have to assume that you will get no response at

all. You can retry a few times (TCP retries transparently, but you may also retry at the

application level), wait for a timeout to elapse, and eventually declare the node dead if

you don’t hear back within the timeout.

Timeouts and Unbounded Delays

If a timeout is the only sure way of detecting a fault, then how long should the time‐

out be? There is unfortunately no simple answer.

A long timeout means a long wait until a node is declared dead (and during this time,

users may have to wait or see error messages). A short timeout detects faults faster,

but carries a higher risk of incorrectly declaring a node dead when in fact it has only

suffered a temporary slowdown (e.g., due to a load spike on the node or the network).

Prematurely declaring a node dead is problematic: if the node is actually alive and in

the middle of performing some action (for example, sending an email), and another

node takes over, the action may end up being performed twice. We will discuss this

issue in more detail in “Knowledge, Truth, and Lies” on page 300, and in Chapters 9

and 11.

When a node is declared dead, its responsibilities need to be transferred to other

nodes, which places additional load on other nodes and the network. If the system is

already struggling with high load, declaring nodes dead prematurely can make the

problem worse. In particular, it could happen that the node actually wasn’t dead but

only slow to respond due to overload; transferring its load to other nodes can cause a

cascading failure (in the extreme case, all nodes declare each other dead, and every‐

thing stops working).

Unreliable Networks | 281

Imagine a fictitious system with a network that guaranteed a maximum delay for

packets—every packet is either delivered within some time d, or it is lost, but delivery

never takes longer than d. Furthermore, assume that you can guarantee that a non-

failed node always handles a request within some time r. In this case, you could guar‐

antee that every successful request receives a response within time 2 d + r—and if you

don’t receive a response within that time, you know that either the network or the

remote node is not working. If this was true, 2 d + r would be a reasonable timeout to

use.

Unfortunately, most systems we work with have neither of those guarantees: asyn‐

chronous networks have unbounded delays (that is, they try to deliver packets as

quickly as possible, but there is no upper limit on the time it may take for a packet to

arrive), and most server implementations cannot guarantee that they can handle

requests within some maximum time (see “Response time guarantees” on page 298).

For failure detection, it’s not sufficient for the system to be fast most of the time: if

your timeout is low, it only takes a transient spike in round-trip times to throw the

system off-balance.

Network congestion and queueing

When driving a car, travel times on road networks often vary most due to traffic con‐

gestion. Similarly, the variability of packet delays on computer networks is most often

due to queueing [25]:

• If several different nodes simultaneously try to send packets to the same destina‐

tion, the network switch must queue them up and feed them into the destination

network link one by one (as illustrated in Figure 8-2). On a busy network link, a

packet may have to wait a while until it can get a slot (this is called network con‐

gestion). If there is so much incoming data that the switch queue fills up, the

packet is dropped, so it needs to be resent—even though the network is function‐

ing fine.

• When a packet reaches the destination machine, if all CPU cores are currently

busy, the incoming request from the network is queued by the operating system

until the application is ready to handle it. Depending on the load on the machine,

this may take an arbitrary length of time.

• In virtualized environments, a running operating system is often paused for tens

of milliseconds while another virtual machine uses a CPU core. During this time,

the VM cannot consume any data from the network, so the incoming data is

queued (buffered) by the virtual machine monitor [26], further increasing the

variability of network delays.

• TCP performs flow control (also known as congestion avoidance or backpressure),

in which a node limits its own rate of sending in order to avoid overloading a

282 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

network link or the receiving node [27]. This means additional queueing at the

sender before the data even enters the network.

Figure 8-2. If several machines send network traffic to the same destination, its switch

queue can fill up. Here, ports 1, 2, and 4 are all trying to send packets to port 3.

Moreover, TCP considers a packet to be lost if it is not acknowledged within some

timeout (which is calculated from observed round-trip times), and lost packets are

automatically retransmitted. Although the application does not see the packet loss

and retransmission, it does see the resulting delay (waiting for the timeout to expire,

and then waiting for the retransmitted packet to be acknowledged).

TCP Versus UDP

Some latency-sensitive applications, such as videoconferencing and Voice over IP

(VoIP), use UDP rather than TCP. It’s a trade-off between reliability and variability

of delays: as UDP does not perform flow control and does not retransmit lost packets,

it avoids some of the reasons for variable network delays (although it is still suscepti‐

ble to switch queues and scheduling delays).

UDP is a good choice in situations where delayed data is worthless. For example, in a

VoIP phone call, there probably isn’t enough time to retransmit a lost packet before

its data is due to be played over the loudspeakers. In this case, there’s no point in

retransmitting the packet—the application must instead fill the missing packet’s time

slot with silence (causing a brief interruption in the sound) and move on in the

stream. The retry happens at the human layer instead. (“Could you repeat that please?

The sound just cut out for a moment.”)

All of these factors contribute to the variability of network delays. Queueing delays

have an especially wide range when a system is close to its maximum capacity: a sys‐

Unreliable Networks | 283

tem with plenty of spare capacity can easily drain queues, whereas in a highly utilized

system, long queues can build up very quickly.

In public clouds and multi-tenant datacenters, resources are shared among many

customers: the network links and switches, and even each machine’s network inter‐

face and CPUs (when running on virtual machines), are shared. Batch workloads

such as MapReduce (see Chapter 10) can easily saturate network links. As you have

no control over or insight into other customers’ usage of the shared resources, net‐

work delays can be highly variable if someone near you (a noisy neighbor) is using a

lot of resources [28, 29].

In such environments, you can only choose timeouts experimentally: measure the

distribution of network round-trip times over an extended period, and over many

machines, to determine the expected variability of delays. Then, taking into account

your application’s characteristics, you can determine an appropriate trade-off

between failure detection delay and risk of premature timeouts.

Even better, rather than using configured constant timeouts, systems can continually

measure response times and their variability ( jitter), and automatically adjust time‐

outs according to the observed response time distribution. This can be done with a

Phi Accrual failure detector [30], which is used for example in Akka and Cassandra

[31]. TCP retransmission timeouts also work similarly [27].

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks

Distributed systems would be a lot simpler if we could rely on the network to deliver

packets with some fixed maximum delay, and not to drop packets. Why can’t we

solve this at the hardware level and make the network reliable so that the software

doesn’t need to worry about it?

To answer this question, it’s interesting to compare datacenter networks to the tradi‐

tional fixed-line telephone network (non-cellular, non-VoIP), which is extremely

reliable: delayed audio frames and dropped calls are very rare. A phone call requires a

constantly low end-to-end latency and enough bandwidth to transfer the audio sam‐

ples of your voice. Wouldn’t it be nice to have similar reliability and predictability in

computer networks?

When you make a call over the telephone network, it establishes a circuit: a fixed,

guaranteed amount of bandwidth is allocated for the call, along the entire route

between the two callers. This circuit remains in place until the call ends [32]. For

example, an ISDN network runs at a fixed rate of 4,000 frames per second. When a

call is established, it is allocated 16 bits of space within each frame (in each direction).

Thus, for the duration of the call, each side is guaranteed to be able to send exactly 16

bits of audio data every 250 microseconds [33, 34].

284 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

This kind of network is synchronous: even as data passes through several routers, it does not suffer from queueing, because the 16 bits of space for the call have already been reserved in the next hop of the network. And because there is no queueing, the

maximum end-to-end latency of the network is fixed. We call this a bounded delay.

Can we not simply make network delays predictable?

Note that a circuit in a telephone network is very different from a TCP connection: a

circuit is a fixed amount of reserved bandwidth which nobody else can use while the

circuit is established, whereas the packets of a TCP connection opportunistically use

whatever network bandwidth is available. You can give TCP a variable-sized block of

data (e.g., an email or a web page), and it will try to transfer it in the shortest time

possible. While a TCP connection is idle, it doesn’t use any bandwidth.ii

If datacenter networks and the internet were circuit-switched networks, it would be

possible to establish a guaranteed maximum round-trip time when a circuit was set

up. However, they are not: Ethernet and IP are packet-switched protocols, which suf‐

fer from queueing and thus unbounded delays in the network. These protocols do

not have the concept of a circuit.

Why do datacenter networks and the internet use packet switching? The answer is

that they are optimized for bursty traffic. A circuit is good for an audio or video call,

which needs to transfer a fairly constant number of bits per second for the duration

of the call. On the other hand, requesting a web page, sending an email, or transfer‐

ring a file doesn’t have any particular bandwidth requirement—we just want it to

complete as quickly as possible.

If you wanted to transfer a file over a circuit, you would have to guess a bandwidth

allocation. If you guess too low, the transfer is unnecessarily slow, leaving network

capacity unused. If you guess too high, the circuit cannot be set up (because the net‐

work cannot allow a circuit to be created if its bandwidth allocation cannot be guar‐

anteed). Thus, using circuits for bursty data transfers wastes network capacity and

makes transfers unnecessarily slow. By contrast, TCP dynamically adapts the rate of

data transfer to the available network capacity.

There have been some attempts to build hybrid networks that support both circuit

switching and packet switching, such as ATM.iii InfiniBand has some similarities [35]:

it implements end-to-end flow control at the link layer, which reduces the need for

ii. Except perhaps for an occasional keepalive packet, if TCP keepalive is enabled.

iii. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was a competitor to Ethernet in the 1980s [32], but it didn’t gain much adoption outside of telephone network core switches. It has nothing to do with automatic teller machines (also known as cash machines), despite sharing an acronym. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, the internet is based on something like ATM—in that universe, internet video calls are probably a lot more reliable than they are in ours, because they don’t suffer from dropped and delayed packets.

Unreliable Networks | 285

queueing in the network, although it can still suffer from delays due to link conges‐

tion [36]. With careful use of quality of service (QoS, prioritization and scheduling of packets) and admission control (rate-limiting senders), it is possible to emulate circuit switching on packet networks, or provide statistically bounded delay [25, 32].

Latency and Resource Utilization

More generally, you can think of variable delays as a consequence of dynamic

resource partitioning.

Say you have a wire between two telephone switches that can carry up to 10,000

simultaneous calls. Each circuit that is switched over this wire occupies one of those

call slots. Thus, you can think of the wire as a resource that can be shared by up to

10,000 simultaneous users. The resource is divided up in a static way: even if you’re

the only call on the wire right now, and all other 9,999 slots are unused, your circuit is

still allocated the same fixed amount of bandwidth as when the wire is fully utilized.

By contrast, the internet shares network bandwidth dynamically. Senders push and

jostle with each other to get their packets over the wire as quickly as possible, and the

network switches decide which packet to send (i.e., the bandwidth allocation) from

one moment to the next. This approach has the downside of queueing, but the advan‐

tage is that it maximizes utilization of the wire. The wire has a fixed cost, so if you

utilize it better, each byte you send over the wire is cheaper.

A similar situation arises with CPUs: if you share each CPU core dynamically

between several threads, one thread sometimes has to wait in the operating system’s

run queue while another thread is running, so a thread can be paused for varying

lengths of time. However, this utilizes the hardware better than if you allocated a

static number of CPU cycles to each thread (see “Response time guarantees” on page

298). Better hardware utilization is also a significant motivation for using virtual

machines.

Latency guarantees are achievable in certain environments, if resources are statically

partitioned (e.g., dedicated hardware and exclusive bandwidth allocations). However,

it comes at the cost of reduced utilization—in other words, it is more expensive. On

the other hand, multi-tenancy with dynamic resource partitioning provides better

utilization, so it is cheaper, but it has the downside of variable delays.

Variable delays in networks are not a law of nature, but simply the result of a cost/

benefit trade-off.

286 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

However, such quality of service is currently not enabled in multi-tenant datacenters

and public clouds, or when communicating via the internet.iv Currently deployed

technology does not allow us to make any guarantees about delays or reliability of the

network: we have to assume that network congestion, queueing, and unbounded

delays will happen. Consequently, there’s no “correct” value for timeouts—they need

to be determined experimentally.

Unreliable Clocks

Clocks and time are important. Applications depend on clocks in various ways to

answer questions like the following:

1. Has this request timed out yet?

2. What’s the 99th percentile response time of this service?

3. How many queries per second did this service handle on average in the last five

minutes?

4. How long did the user spend on our site?

5. When was this article published?

6. At what date and time should the reminder email be sent?

7. When does this cache entry expire?

8. What is the timestamp on this error message in the log file?

Examples 1–4 measure durations (e.g., the time interval between a request being sent

and a response being received), whereas examples 5–8 describe points in time (events

that occur on a particular date, at a particular time).

In a distributed system, time is a tricky business, because communication is not

instantaneous: it takes time for a message to travel across the network from one

machine to another. The time when a message is received is always later than the

time when it is sent, but due to variable delays in the network, we don’t know how

much later. This fact sometimes makes it difficult to determine the order in which

things happened when multiple machines are involved.

Moreover, each machine on the network has its own clock, which is an actual hard‐

ware device: usually a quartz crystal oscillator. These devices are not perfectly accu‐

rate, so each machine has its own notion of time, which may be slightly faster or

iv. Peering agreements between internet service providers and the establishment of routes through the Bor‐

der Gateway Protocol (BGP), bear closer resemblance to circuit switching than IP itself. At this level, it is possible to buy dedicated bandwidth. However, internet routing operates at the level of networks, not individual connections between hosts, and at a much longer timescale.

Unreliable Clocks | 287

slower than on other machines. It is possible to synchronize clocks to some degree:

the most commonly used mechanism is the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which

allows the computer clock to be adjusted according to the time reported by a group of

servers [37]. The servers in turn get their time from a more accurate time source,

such as a GPS receiver.

Monotonic Versus Time-of-Day Clocks

Modern computers have at least two different kinds of clocks: a time-of-day clock and

a monotonic clock. Although they both measure time, it is important to distinguish

the two, since they serve different purposes.

Time-of-day clocks

A time-of-day clock does what you intuitively expect of a clock: it returns the current

date and time according to some calendar (also known as wall-clock time). For exam‐

ple, clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME) on Linuxv and System.currentTimeMillis()

in Java return the number of seconds (or milliseconds) since the epoch: midnight

UTC on January 1, 1970, according to the Gregorian calendar, not counting leap sec‐

onds. Some systems use other dates as their reference point.

Time-of-day clocks are usually synchronized with NTP, which means that a time‐

stamp from one machine (ideally) means the same as a timestamp on another

machine. However, time-of-day clocks also have various oddities, as described in the

next section. In particular, if the local clock is too far ahead of the NTP server, it may

be forcibly reset and appear to jump back to a previous point in time. These jumps, as

well as the fact that they often ignore leap seconds, make time-of-day clocks unsuita‐

ble for measuring elapsed time [38].

Time-of-day clocks have also historically had quite a coarse-grained resolution, e.g.,

moving forward in steps of 10 ms on older Windows systems [39]. On recent sys‐

tems, this is less of a problem.

Monotonic clocks

A monotonic clock is suitable for measuring a duration (time interval), such as a

timeout or a service’s response time: clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) on Linux

and System.nanoTime() in Java are monotonic clocks, for example. The name comes

from the fact that they are guaranteed to always move forward (whereas a time-of-

day clock may jump back in time).

v. Although the clock is called real-time, it has nothing to do with real-time operating systems, as discussed in “Response time guarantees” on page 298.

288 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

You can check the value of the monotonic clock at one point in time, do something,

and then check the clock again at a later time. The difference between the two values

tells you how much time elapsed between the two checks. However, the absolute

value of the clock is meaningless: it might be the number of nanoseconds since the

computer was started, or something similarly arbitrary. In particular, it makes no

sense to compare monotonic clock values from two different computers, because they

don’t mean the same thing.

On a server with multiple CPU sockets, there may be a separate timer per CPU,

which is not necessarily synchronized with other CPUs. Operating systems compen‐

sate for any discrepancy and try to present a monotonic view of the clock to applica‐

tion threads, even as they are scheduled across different CPUs. However, it is wise to

take this guarantee of monotonicity with a pinch of salt [40].

NTP may adjust the frequency at which the monotonic clock moves forward (this is

known as slewing the clock) if it detects that the computer’s local quartz is moving

faster or slower than the NTP server. By default, NTP allows the clock rate to be spee‐

ded up or slowed down by up to 0.05%, but NTP cannot cause the monotonic clock

to jump forward or backward. The resolution of monotonic clocks is usually quite

good: on most systems they can measure time intervals in microseconds or less.

In a distributed system, using a monotonic clock for measuring elapsed time (e.g.,

timeouts) is usually fine, because it doesn’t assume any synchronization between dif‐

ferent nodes’ clocks and is not sensitive to slight inaccuracies of measurement.

Clock Synchronization and Accuracy

Monotonic clocks don’t need synchronization, but time-of-day clocks need to be set

according to an NTP server or other external time source in order to be useful.

Unfortunately, our methods for getting a clock to tell the correct time aren’t nearly as

reliable or accurate as you might hope—hardware clocks and NTP can be fickle

beasts. To give just a few examples:

• The quartz clock in a computer is not very accurate: it drifts (runs faster or

slower than it should). Clock drift varies depending on the temperature of the

machine. Google assumes a clock drift of 200 ppm (parts per million) for its

servers [41], which is equivalent to 6 ms drift for a clock that is resynchronized

with a server every 30 seconds, or 17 seconds drift for a clock that is resynchron‐

ized once a day. This drift limits the best possible accuracy you can achieve, even

if everything is working correctly.

• If a computer’s clock differs too much from an NTP server, it may refuse to syn‐

chronize, or the local clock will be forcibly reset [37]. Any applications observing

the time before and after this reset may see time go backward or suddenly jump

forward.

Unreliable Clocks | 289

• If a node is accidentally firewalled off from NTP servers, the misconfiguration

may go unnoticed for some time. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this does hap‐

pen in practice.

• NTP synchronization can only be as good as the network delay, so there is a limit

to its accuracy when you’re on a congested network with variable packet delays.

One experiment showed that a minimum error of 35 ms is achievable when syn‐

chronizing over the internet [42], though occasional spikes in network delay lead

to errors of around a second. Depending on the configuration, large network

delays can cause the NTP client to give up entirely.

• Some NTP servers are wrong or misconfigured, reporting time that is off by

hours [43, 44]. NTP clients are quite robust, because they query several servers

and ignore outliers. Nevertheless, it’s somewhat worrying to bet the correctness

of your systems on the time that you were told by a stranger on the internet.

• Leap seconds result in a minute that is 59 seconds or 61 seconds long, which

messes up timing assumptions in systems that are not designed with leap seconds

in mind [45]. The fact that leap seconds have crashed many large systems [38,

46] shows how easy it is for incorrect assumptions about clocks to sneak into a

system. The best way of handling leap seconds may be to make NTP servers “lie,”

by performing the leap second adjustment gradually over the course of a day

(this is known as smearing) [47, 48], although actual NTP server behavior varies

in practice [49].

• In virtual machines, the hardware clock is virtualized, which raises additional

challenges for applications that need accurate timekeeping [50]. When a CPU

core is shared between virtual machines, each VM is paused for tens of milli‐

seconds while another VM is running. From an application’s point of view, this

pause manifests itself as the clock suddenly jumping forward [26].

• If you run software on devices that you don’t fully control (e.g., mobile or

embedded devices), you probably cannot trust the device’s hardware clock at all.

Some users deliberately set their hardware clock to an incorrect date and time,

for example to circumvent timing limitations in games. As a result, the clock

might be set to a time wildly in the past or the future.

It is possible to achieve very good clock accuracy if you care about it sufficiently to

invest significant resources. For example, the MiFID II draft European regulation for

financial institutions requires all high-frequency trading funds to synchronize their

clocks to within 100 microseconds of UTC, in order to help debug market anomalies

such as “flash crashes” and to help detect market manipulation [51].

Such accuracy can be achieved using GPS receivers, the Precision Time Protocol

(PTP) [52], and careful deployment and monitoring. However, it requires significant

effort and expertise, and there are plenty of ways clock synchronization can go

290 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

wrong. If your NTP daemon is misconfigured, or a firewall is blocking NTP traffic,

the clock error due to drift can quickly become large.

Relying on Synchronized Clocks

The problem with clocks is that while they seem simple and easy to use, they have a

surprising number of pitfalls: a day may not have exactly 86,400 seconds, time-of-day

clocks may move backward in time, and the time on one node may be quite different

from the time on another node.

Earlier in this chapter we discussed networks dropping and arbitrarily delaying pack‐

ets. Even though networks are well behaved most of the time, software must be

designed on the assumption that the network will occasionally be faulty, and the soft‐

ware must handle such faults gracefully. The same is true with clocks: although they

work quite well most of the time, robust software needs to be prepared to deal with

incorrect clocks.

Part of the problem is that incorrect clocks easily go unnoticed. If a machine’s CPU is

defective or its network is misconfigured, it most likely won’t work at all, so it will

quickly be noticed and fixed. On the other hand, if its quartz clock is defective or its

NTP client is misconfigured, most things will seem to work fine, even though its

clock gradually drifts further and further away from reality. If some piece of software

is relying on an accurately synchronized clock, the result is more likely to be silent

and subtle data loss than a dramatic crash [53, 54].

Thus, if you use software that requires synchronized clocks, it is essential that you

also carefully monitor the clock offsets between all the machines. Any node whose

clock drifts too far from the others should be declared dead and removed from the

cluster. Such monitoring ensures that you notice the broken clocks before they can

cause too much damage.

Timestamps for ordering events

Let’s consider one particular situation in which it is tempting, but dangerous, to rely

on clocks: ordering of events across multiple nodes. For example, if two clients write

to a distributed database, who got there first? Which write is the more recent one?

Figure 8-3 illustrates a dangerous use of time-of-day clocks in a database with multi-

leader replication (the example is similar to Figure 5-9). Client A writes x = 1 on node 1; the write is replicated to node 3; client B increments x on node 3 (we now have x = 2); and finally, both writes are replicated to node 2.

Unreliable Clocks | 291

Figure 8-3. The write by client B is causally later than the write by client A, but B’s

write has an earlier timestamp.

In Figure 8-3, when a write is replicated to other nodes, it is tagged with a timestamp

according to the time-of-day clock on the node where the write originated. The clock

synchronization is very good in this example: the skew between node 1 and node 3 is

less than 3 ms, which is probably better than you can expect in practice.

Nevertheless, the timestamps in Figure 8-3 fail to order the events correctly: the write x = 1 has a timestamp of 42.004 seconds, but the write x = 2 has a timestamp of 42.003 seconds, even though x = 2 occurred unambiguously later. When node 2

receives these two events, it will incorrectly conclude that x = 1 is the more recent

value and drop the write x = 2. In effect, client B’s increment operation will be lost.

This conflict resolution strategy is called last write wins (LWW), and it is widely used

in both multi-leader replication and leaderless databases such as Cassandra [53] and

Riak [54] (see “Last write wins (discarding concurrent writes)” on page 186). Some

implementations generate timestamps on the client rather than the server, but this

doesn’t change the fundamental problems with LWW:

• Database writes can mysteriously disappear: a node with a lagging clock is unable

to overwrite values previously written by a node with a fast clock until the clock

skew between the nodes has elapsed [54, 55]. This scenario can cause arbitrary

amounts of data to be silently dropped without any error being reported to the

application.

• LWW cannot distinguish between writes that occurred sequentially in quick suc‐

cession (in Figure 8-3, client B’s increment definitely occurs after client A’s write) and writes that were truly concurrent (neither writer was aware of the other). Additional causality tracking mechanisms, such as version vectors, are

292 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

needed in order to prevent violations of causality (see “Detecting Concurrent

Writes” on page 184).

• It is possible for two nodes to independently generate writes with the same time‐

stamp, especially when the clock only has millisecond resolution. An additional

tiebreaker value (which can simply be a large random number) is required to

resolve such conflicts, but this approach can also lead to violations of causality

[53].

Thus, even though it is tempting to resolve conflicts by keeping the most “recent”

value and discarding others, it’s important to be aware that the definition of “recent”

depends on a local time-of-day clock, which may well be incorrect. Even with tightly

NTP-synchronized clocks, you could send a packet at timestamp 100 ms (according

to the sender’s clock) and have it arrive at timestamp 99 ms (according to the recipi‐

ent’s clock)—so it appears as though the packet arrived before it was sent, which is

impossible.

Could NTP synchronization be made accurate enough that such incorrect orderings

cannot occur? Probably not, because NTP’s synchronization accuracy is itself limited

by the network round-trip time, in addition to other sources of error such as quartz

drift. For correct ordering, you would need the clock source to be significantly more

accurate than the thing you are measuring (namely network delay).

So-called logical clocks [56, 57], which are based on incrementing counters rather than an oscillating quartz crystal, are a safer alternative for ordering events (see “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184). Logical clocks do not measure the time

of day or the number of seconds elapsed, only the relative ordering of events

(whether one event happened before or after another). In contrast, time-of-day and

monotonic clocks, which measure actual elapsed time, are also known as physical

clocks. We’ll look at ordering a bit more in “Ordering Guarantees” on page 339.

Clock readings have a confidence interval

You may be able to read a machine’s time-of-day clock with microsecond or even

nanosecond resolution. But even if you can get such a fine-grained measurement,

that doesn’t mean the value is actually accurate to such precision. In fact, it most

likely is not—as mentioned previously, the drift in an imprecise quartz clock can

easily be several milliseconds, even if you synchronize with an NTP server on the

local network every minute. With an NTP server on the public internet, the best pos‐

sible accuracy is probably to the tens of milliseconds, and the error may easily spike

to over 100 ms when there is network congestion [57].

Thus, it doesn’t make sense to think of a clock reading as a point in time—it is more

like a range of times, within a confidence interval: for example, a system may be 95%

confident that the time now is between 10.3 and 10.5 seconds past the minute, but it

Unreliable Clocks | 293

doesn’t know any more precisely than that [58]. If we only know the time +/– 100 ms,

the microsecond digits in the timestamp are essentially meaningless.

The uncertainty bound can be calculated based on your time source. If you have a

GPS receiver or atomic (caesium) clock directly attached to your computer, the

expected error range is reported by the manufacturer. If you’re getting the time from

a server, the uncertainty is based on the expected quartz drift since your last sync

with the server, plus the NTP server’s uncertainty, plus the network round-trip time

to the server (to a first approximation, and assuming you trust the server).

Unfortunately, most systems don’t expose this uncertainty: for example, when you

call clock_gettime(), the return value doesn’t tell you the expected error of the

timestamp, so you don’t know if its confidence interval is five milliseconds or five

years.

An interesting exception is Google’s TrueTime API in Spanner [41], which explicitly reports the confidence interval on the local clock. When you ask it for the current time, you get back two values: [ earliest, latest], which are the earliest possible

and the latest possible timestamp. Based on its uncertainty calculations, the clock

knows that the actual current time is somewhere within that interval. The width of

the interval depends, among other things, on how long it has been since the local

quartz clock was last synchronized with a more accurate clock source.

Synchronized clocks for global snapshots

In “Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read” on page 237 we discussed snapshot iso‐

lation, which is a very useful feature in databases that need to support both small, fast

read-write transactions and large, long-running read-only transactions (e.g., for

backups or analytics). It allows read-only transactions to see the database in a consis‐

tent state at a particular point in time, without locking and interfering with read-

write transactions.

The most common implementation of snapshot isolation requires a monotonically

increasing transaction ID. If a write happened later than the snapshot (i.e., the write

has a greater transaction ID than the snapshot), that write is invisible to the snapshot

transaction. On a single-node database, a simple counter is sufficient for generating

transaction IDs.

However, when a database is distributed across many machines, potentially in multi‐

ple datacenters, a global, monotonically increasing transaction ID (across all parti‐

tions) is difficult to generate, because it requires coordination. The transaction ID

must reflect causality: if transaction B reads a value that was written by transaction A,

then B must have a higher transaction ID than A—otherwise, the snapshot would not

294 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

be consistent. With lots of small, rapid transactions, creating transaction IDs in a dis‐

tributed system becomes an untenable bottleneck.vi

Can we use the timestamps from synchronized time-of-day clocks as transaction IDs?

If we could get the synchronization good enough, they would have the right proper‐

ties: later transactions have a higher timestamp. The problem, of course, is the uncer‐

tainty about clock accuracy.

Spanner implements snapshot isolation across datacenters in this way [59, 60]. It uses

the clock’s confidence interval as reported by the TrueTime API, and is based on the

following observation: if you have two confidence intervals, each consisting of an ear‐

liest and latest possible timestamp ( A = [ Aearliest, Alatest] and B = [ Bearliest, Blatest]), and those two intervals do not overlap (i.e., Aearliest < Alatest < Bearliest < Blatest), then B definitely happened after A—there can be no doubt. Only if the intervals overlap are we unsure in which order A and B happened.

In order to ensure that transaction timestamps reflect causality, Spanner deliberately

waits for the length of the confidence interval before committing a read-write trans‐

action. By doing so, it ensures that any transaction that may read the data is at a suffi‐

ciently later time, so their confidence intervals do not overlap. In order to keep the

wait time as short as possible, Spanner needs to keep the clock uncertainty as small as

possible; for this purpose, Google deploys a GPS receiver or atomic clock in each

datacenter, allowing clocks to be synchronized to within about 7 ms [41].

Using clock synchronization for distributed transaction semantics is an area of active

research [57, 61, 62]. These ideas are interesting, but they have not yet been imple‐

mented in mainstream databases outside of Google.

Process Pauses

Let’s consider another example of dangerous clock use in a distributed system. Say

you have a database with a single leader per partition. Only the leader is allowed to

accept writes. How does a node know that it is still leader (that it hasn’t been declared

dead by the others), and that it may safely accept writes?

One option is for the leader to obtain a lease from the other nodes, which is similar to

a lock with a timeout [63]. Only one node can hold the lease at any one time—thus,

when a node obtains a lease, it knows that it is the leader for some amount of time,

until the lease expires. In order to remain leader, the node must periodically renew

vi. There are distributed sequence number generators, such as Twitter’s Snowflake, that generate approximately monotonically increasing unique IDs in a scalable way (e.g., by allocating blocks of the ID space to different nodes). However, they typically cannot guarantee an ordering that is consistent with causality, because the timescale at which blocks of IDs are assigned is longer than the timescale of database reads and writes. See also “Ordering Guarantees” on page 339.

Unreliable Clocks | 295

the lease before it expires. If the node fails, it stops renewing the lease, so another

node can take over when it expires.

You can imagine the request-handling loop looking something like this:

while (true) {

request = getIncomingRequest();

// Ensure that the lease always has at least 10 seconds remaining

if (lease.expiryTimeMillis - System.currentTimeMillis() < 10000) {

lease = lease.renew();

}

if (lease.isValid()) {

process(request);

}

}

What’s wrong with this code? Firstly, it’s relying on synchronized clocks: the expiry

time on the lease is set by a different machine (where the expiry may be calculated as

the current time plus 30 seconds, for example), and it’s being compared to the local

system clock. If the clocks are out of sync by more than a few seconds, this code will

start doing strange things.

Secondly, even if we change the protocol to only use the local monotonic clock, there

is another problem: the code assumes that very little time passes between the point

that it checks the time (System.currentTimeMillis()) and the time when the

request is processed (process(request)). Normally this code runs very quickly, so

the 10 second buffer is more than enough to ensure that the lease doesn’t expire in

the middle of processing a request.

However, what if there is an unexpected pause in the execution of the program? For

example, imagine the thread stops for 15 seconds around the line lease.isValid()

before finally continuing. In that case, it’s likely that the lease will have expired by the

time the request is processed, and another node has already taken over as leader.

However, there is nothing to tell this thread that it was paused for so long, so this

code won’t notice that the lease has expired until the next iteration of the loop—by

which time it may have already done something unsafe by processing the request.

Is it crazy to assume that a thread might be paused for so long? Unfortunately not.

There are various reasons why this could happen:

• Many programming language runtimes (such as the Java Virtual Machine) have

a garbage collector (GC) that occasionally needs to stop all running threads.

These “stop-the-world” GC pauses have sometimes been known to last for several

minutes [64]! Even so-called “concurrent” garbage collectors like the HotSpot

JVM’s CMS cannot fully run in parallel with the application code—even they

need to stop the world from time to time [65]. Although the pauses can often be

296 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

reduced by changing allocation patterns or tuning GC settings [66], we must

assume the worst if we want to offer robust guarantees.

• In virtualized environments, a virtual machine can be suspended (pausing the

execution of all processes and saving the contents of memory to disk) and

resumed (restoring the contents of memory and continuing execution). This

pause can occur at any time in a process’s execution and can last for an arbitrary

length of time. This feature is sometimes used for live migration of virtual

machines from one host to another without a reboot, in which case the length of

the pause depends on the rate at which processes are writing to memory [67].

• On end-user devices such as laptops, execution may also be suspended and

resumed arbitrarily, e.g., when the user closes the lid of their laptop.

• When the operating system context-switches to another thread, or when the

hypervisor switches to a different virtual machine (when running in a virtual

machine), the currently running thread can be paused at any arbitrary point in

the code. In the case of a virtual machine, the CPU time spent in other virtual

machines is known as steal time. If the machine is under heavy load—i.e., if there

is a long queue of threads waiting to run—it may take some time before the

paused thread gets to run again.

• If the application performs synchronous disk access, a thread may be paused

waiting for a slow disk I/O operation to complete [68]. In many languages, disk

access can happen surprisingly, even if the code doesn’t explicitly mention file

access—for example, the Java classloader lazily loads class files when they are first

used, which could happen at any time in the program execution. I/O pauses and

GC pauses may even conspire to combine their delays [69]. If the disk is actually

a network filesystem or network block device (such as Amazon’s EBS), the I/O

latency is further subject to the variability of network delays [29].

• If the operating system is configured to allow swapping to disk ( paging), a simple

memory access may result in a page fault that requires a page from disk to be

loaded into memory. The thread is paused while this slow I/O operation takes

place. If memory pressure is high, this may in turn require a different page to be

swapped out to disk. In extreme circumstances, the operating system may spend

most of its time swapping pages in and out of memory and getting little actual

work done (this is known as thrashing). To avoid this problem, paging is often

disabled on server machines (if you would rather kill a process to free up mem‐

ory than risk thrashing).

• A Unix process can be paused by sending it the SIGSTOP signal, for example by

pressing Ctrl-Z in a shell. This signal immediately stops the process from getting

any more CPU cycles until it is resumed with SIGCONT, at which point it contin‐

ues running where it left off. Even if your environment does not normally use

SIGSTOP, it might be sent accidentally by an operations engineer.

Unreliable Clocks | 297

All of these occurrences can preempt the running thread at any point and resume it at

some later time, without the thread even noticing. The problem is similar to making

multi-threaded code on a single machine thread-safe: you can’t assume anything

about timing, because arbitrary context switches and parallelism may occur.

When writing multi-threaded code on a single machine, we have fairly good tools for

making it thread-safe: mutexes, semaphores, atomic counters, lock-free data struc‐

tures, blocking queues, and so on. Unfortunately, these tools don’t directly translate

to distributed systems, because a distributed system has no shared memory—only

messages sent over an unreliable network.

A node in a distributed system must assume that its execution can be paused for a

significant length of time at any point, even in the middle of a function. During the

pause, the rest of the world keeps moving and may even declare the paused node

dead because it’s not responding. Eventually, the paused node may continue running,

without even noticing that it was asleep until it checks its clock sometime later.

Response time guarantees

In many programming languages and operating systems, threads and processes may

pause for an unbounded amount of time, as discussed. Those reasons for pausing can

be eliminated if you try hard enough.

Some software runs in environments where a failure to respond within a specified

time can cause serious damage: computers that control aircraft, rockets, robots, cars,

and other physical objects must respond quickly and predictably to their sensor

inputs. In these systems, there is a specified deadline by which the software must

respond; if it doesn’t meet the deadline, that may cause a failure of the entire system.

These are so-called hard real-time systems.

Is real-time really real?

In embedded systems, real-time means that a system is carefully

designed and tested to meet specified timing guarantees in all cir‐

cumstances. This meaning is in contrast to the more vague use of

the term real-time on the web, where it describes servers pushing

data to clients and stream processing without hard response time

constraints (see Chapter 11).

For example, if your car’s onboard sensors detect that you are currently experiencing

a crash, you wouldn’t want the release of the airbag to be delayed due to an inoppor‐

tune GC pause in the airbag release system.

Providing real-time guarantees in a system requires support from all levels of the

software stack: a real-time operating system (RTOS) that allows processes to be sched‐

uled with a guaranteed allocation of CPU time in specified intervals is needed; library

298 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

functions must document their worst-case execution times; dynamic memory alloca‐

tion may be restricted or disallowed entirely (real-time garbage collectors exist, but

the application must still ensure that it doesn’t give the GC too much work to do);

and an enormous amount of testing and measurement must be done to ensure that

guarantees are being met.

All of this requires a large amount of additional work and severely restricts the range

of programming languages, libraries, and tools that can be used (since most lan‐

guages and tools do not provide real-time guarantees). For these reasons, developing

real-time systems is very expensive, and they are most commonly used in safety-

critical embedded devices. Moreover, “real-time” is not the same as “high-

performance”—in fact, real-time systems may have lower throughput, since they

have to prioritize timely responses above all else (see also “Latency and Resource Uti‐

lization” on page 286).

For most server-side data processing systems, real-time guarantees are simply not

economical or appropriate. Consequently, these systems must suffer the pauses and

clock instability that come from operating in a non-real-time environment.

Limiting the impact of garbage collection

The negative effects of process pauses can be mitigated without resorting to expen‐

sive real-time scheduling guarantees. Language runtimes have some flexibility

around when they schedule garbage collections, because they can track the rate of

object allocation and the remaining free memory over time.

An emerging idea is to treat GC pauses like brief planned outages of a node, and to

let other nodes handle requests from clients while one node is collecting its garbage.

If the runtime can warn the application that a node soon requires a GC pause, the

application can stop sending new requests to that node, wait for it to finish process‐

ing outstanding requests, and then perform the GC while no requests are in progress.

This trick hides GC pauses from clients and reduces the high percentiles of response

time [70, 71]. Some latency-sensitive financial trading systems [72] use this approach.

A variant of this idea is to use the garbage collector only for short-lived objects

(which are fast to collect) and to restart processes periodically, before they accumu‐

late enough long-lived objects to require a full GC of long-lived objects [65, 73]. One

node can be restarted at a time, and traffic can be shifted away from the node before

the planned restart, like in a rolling upgrade (see Chapter 4).

These measures cannot fully prevent garbage collection pauses, but they can usefully

reduce their impact on the application.

Unreliable Clocks | 299

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies

So far in this chapter we have explored the ways in which distributed systems are dif‐

ferent from programs running on a single computer: there is no shared memory, only

message passing via an unreliable network with variable delays, and the systems may

suffer from partial failures, unreliable clocks, and processing pauses.

The consequences of these issues are profoundly disorienting if you’re not used to

distributed systems. A node in the network cannot know anything for sure—it can

only make guesses based on the messages it receives (or doesn’t receive) via the net‐

work. A node can only find out what state another node is in (what data it has stored,

whether it is correctly functioning, etc.) by exchanging messages with it. If a remote

node doesn’t respond, there is no way of knowing what state it is in, because prob‐

lems in the network cannot reliably be distinguished from problems at a node.

Discussions of these systems border on the philosophical: What do we know to be

true or false in our system? How sure can we be of that knowledge, if the mechanisms

for perception and measurement are unreliable? Should software systems obey the

laws that we expect of the physical world, such as cause and effect?

Fortunately, we don’t need to go as far as figuring out the meaning of life. In a dis‐

tributed system, we can state the assumptions we are making about the behavior (the

system model) and design the actual system in such a way that it meets those assump‐

tions. Algorithms can be proved to function correctly within a certain system model.

This means that reliable behavior is achievable, even if the underlying system model

provides very few guarantees.

However, although it is possible to make software well behaved in an unreliable sys‐

tem model, it is not straightforward to do so. In the rest of this chapter we will further

explore the notions of knowledge and truth in distributed systems, which will help us

think about the kinds of assumptions we can make and the guarantees we may want

to provide. In Chapter 9 we will proceed to look at some examples of distributed sys‐

tems, algorithms that provide particular guarantees under particular assumptions.

The Truth Is Defined by the Majority

Imagine a network with an asymmetric fault: a node is able to receive all messages

sent to it, but any outgoing messages from that node are dropped or delayed [19].

Even though that node is working perfectly well, and is receiving requests from other

nodes, the other nodes cannot hear its responses. After some timeout, the other

nodes declare it dead, because they haven’t heard from the node. The situation

unfolds like a nightmare: the semi-disconnected node is dragged to the graveyard,

kicking and screaming “I’m not dead!”—but since nobody can hear its screaming, the

funeral procession continues with stoic determination.

300 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

In a slightly less nightmarish scenario, the semi-disconnected node may notice that

the messages it is sending are not being acknowledged by other nodes, and so realize

that there must be a fault in the network. Nevertheless, the node is wrongly declared

dead by the other nodes, and the semi-disconnected node cannot do anything about

it.

As a third scenario, imagine a node that experiences a long stop-the-world garbage

collection pause. All of the node’s threads are preempted by the GC and paused for

one minute, and consequently, no requests are processed and no responses are sent.

The other nodes wait, retry, grow impatient, and eventually declare the node dead

and load it onto the hearse. Finally, the GC finishes and the node’s threads continue

as if nothing had happened. The other nodes are surprised as the supposedly dead

node suddenly raises its head out of the coffin, in full health, and starts cheerfully

chatting with bystanders. At first, the GCing node doesn’t even realize that an entire

minute has passed and that it was declared dead—from its perspective, hardly any

time has passed since it was last talking to the other nodes.

The moral of these stories is that a node cannot necessarily trust its own judgment of

a situation. A distributed system cannot exclusively rely on a single node, because a

node may fail at any time, potentially leaving the system stuck and unable to recover.

Instead, many distributed algorithms rely on a quorum, that is, voting among the

nodes (see “Quorums for reading and writing” on page 179): decisions require some

minimum number of votes from several nodes in order to reduce the dependence on

any one particular node.

That includes decisions about declaring nodes dead. If a quorum of nodes declares

another node dead, then it must be considered dead, even if that node still very much

feels alive. The individual node must abide by the quorum decision and step down.

Most commonly, the quorum is an absolute majority of more than half the nodes

(although other kinds of quorums are possible). A majority quorum allows the sys‐

tem to continue working if individual nodes have failed (with three nodes, one failure

can be tolerated; with five nodes, two failures can be tolerated). However, it is still

safe, because there can only be only one majority in the system—there cannot be two

majorities with conflicting decisions at the same time. We will discuss the use of quo‐

rums in more detail when we get to consensus algorithms in Chapter 9.

The leader and the lock

Frequently, a system requires there to be only one of some thing. For example:

• Only one node is allowed to be the leader for a database partition, to avoid split

brain (see “Handling Node Outages” on page 156).

• Only one transaction or client is allowed to hold the lock for a particular resource

or object, to prevent concurrently writing to it and corrupting it.

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies | 301

• Only one user is allowed to register a particular username, because a username

must uniquely identify a user.

Implementing this in a distributed system requires care: even if a node believes that it

is “the chosen one” (the leader of the partition, the holder of the lock, the request

handler of the user who successfully grabbed the username), that doesn’t necessarily

mean a quorum of nodes agrees! A node may have formerly been the leader, but if

the other nodes declared it dead in the meantime (e.g., due to a network interruption

or GC pause), it may have been demoted and another leader may have already been

elected.

If a node continues acting as the chosen one, even though the majority of nodes have

declared it dead, it could cause problems in a system that is not carefully designed.

Such a node could send messages to other nodes in its self-appointed capacity, and if

other nodes believe it, the system as a whole may do something incorrect.

For example, Figure 8-4 shows a data corruption bug due to an incorrect implemen‐

tation of locking. (The bug is not theoretical: HBase used to have this problem [74,

75].) Say you want to ensure that a file in a storage service can only be accessed by

one client at a time, because if multiple clients tried to write to it, the file would

become corrupted. You try to implement this by requiring a client to obtain a lease

from a lock service before accessing the file.

Figure 8-4. Incorrect implementation of a distributed lock: client 1 believes that it still

has a valid lease, even though it has expired, and thus corrupts a file in storage.

The problem is an example of what we discussed in “Process Pauses” on page 295: if

the client holding the lease is paused for too long, its lease expires. Another client can

obtain a lease for the same file, and start writing to the file. When the paused client

comes back, it believes (incorrectly) that it still has a valid lease and proceeds to also

write to the file. As a result, the clients’ writes clash and corrupt the file.

302 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

Fencing tokens

When using a lock or lease to protect access to some resource, such as the file storage

in Figure 8-4, we need to ensure that a node that is under a false belief of being “the chosen one” cannot disrupt the rest of the system. A fairly simple technique that achieves this goal is called fencing, and is illustrated in Figure 8-5.

Figure 8-5. Making access to storage safe by allowing writes only in the order of increas‐

ing fencing tokens.

Let’s assume that every time the lock server grants a lock or lease, it also returns a

fencing token, which is a number that increases every time a lock is granted (e.g.,

incremented by the lock service). We can then require that every time a client sends a

write request to the storage service, it must include its current fencing token.

In Figure 8-5, client 1 acquires the lease with a token of 33, but then it goes into a

long pause and the lease expires. Client 2 acquires the lease with a token of 34 (the

number always increases) and then sends its write request to the storage service,

including the token of 34. Later, client 1 comes back to life and sends its write to the

storage service, including its token value 33. However, the storage server remembers

that it has already processed a write with a higher token number (34), and so it rejects

the request with token 33.

If ZooKeeper is used as lock service, the transaction ID zxid or the node version

cversion can be used as fencing token. Since they are guaranteed to be monotoni‐

cally increasing, they have the required properties [74].

Note that this mechanism requires the resource itself to take an active role in check‐

ing tokens by rejecting any writes with an older token than one that has already been

processed—it is not sufficient to rely on clients checking their lock status themselves.

For resources that do not explicitly support fencing tokens, you might still be able

work around the limitation (for example, in the case of a file storage service you

could include the fencing token in the filename). However, some kind of check is

necessary to avoid processing requests outside of the lock’s protection.

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies | 303

Checking a token on the server side may seem like a downside, but it is arguably a

good thing: it is unwise for a service to assume that its clients will always be well

behaved, because the clients are often run by people whose priorities are very differ‐

ent from the priorities of the people running the service [76]. Thus, it is a good idea for any service to protect itself from accidentally abusive clients.

Byzantine Faults

Fencing tokens can detect and block a node that is inadvertently acting in error (e.g.,

because it hasn’t yet found out that its lease has expired). However, if the node delib‐

erately wanted to subvert the system’s guarantees, it could easily do so by sending

messages with a fake fencing token.

In this book we assume that nodes are unreliable but honest: they may be slow or

never respond (due to a fault), and their state may be outdated (due to a GC pause or

network delays), but we assume that if a node does respond, it is telling the “truth”: to

the best of its knowledge, it is playing by the rules of the protocol.

Distributed systems problems become much harder if there is a risk that nodes may

“lie” (send arbitrary faulty or corrupted responses)—for example, if a node may claim

to have received a particular message when in fact it didn’t. Such behavior is known

as a Byzantine fault, and the problem of reaching consensus in this untrusting envi‐

ronment is known as the Byzantine Generals Problem [77].

The Byzantine Generals Problem

The Byzantine Generals Problem is a generalization of the so-called Two Generals

Problem [78], which imagines a situation in which two army generals need to agree on a battle plan. As they have set up camp on two different sites, they can only communicate by messenger, and the messengers sometimes get delayed or lost (like packets in a network). We will discuss this problem of consensus in Chapter 9.

In the Byzantine version of the problem, there are n generals who need to agree, and

their endeavor is hampered by the fact that there are some traitors in their midst.

Most of the generals are loyal, and thus send truthful messages, but the traitors may

try to deceive and confuse the others by sending fake or untrue messages (while try‐

ing to remain undiscovered). It is not known in advance who the traitors are.

Byzantium was an ancient Greek city that later became Constantinople, in the place

which is now Istanbul in Turkey. There isn’t any historic evidence that the generals of

Byzantium were any more prone to intrigue and conspiracy than those elsewhere.

Rather, the name is derived from Byzantine in the sense of excessively complicated,

bureaucratic, devious, which was used in politics long before computers [79]. Lamp‐

ort wanted to choose a nationality that would not offend any readers, and he was

advised that calling it The Albanian Generals Problem was not such a good idea [80].

304 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

A system is Byzantine fault-tolerant if it continues to operate correctly even if some of the nodes are malfunctioning and not obeying the protocol, or if malicious attackers are interfering with the network. This concern is relevant in certain specific circumstances. For example: • In aerospace environments, the data in a computer’s memory or CPU register

could become corrupted by radiation, leading it to respond to other nodes in

arbitrarily unpredictable ways. Since a system failure would be very expensive

(e.g., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding

with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzan‐

tine faults [81, 82].

• In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may

attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a

node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with mali‐

cious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other block‐

chains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to

agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central

authority [83].

However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely

assume that there are no Byzantine faults. In your datacenter, all the nodes are con‐

trolled by your organization (so they can hopefully be trusted) and radiation levels

are low enough that memory corruption is not a major problem. Protocols for mak‐

ing systems Byzantine fault-tolerant are quite complicated [84], and fault-tolerant

embedded systems rely on support from the hardware level [81]. In most server-side

data systems, the cost of deploying Byzantine fault-tolerant solutions makes them

impractical.

Web applications do need to expect arbitrary and malicious behavior of clients that

are under end-user control, such as web browsers. This is why input validation, sani‐

tization, and output escaping are so important: to prevent SQL injection and cross-

site scripting, for example. However, we typically don’t use Byzantine fault-tolerant

protocols here, but simply make the server the authority on deciding what client

behavior is and isn’t allowed. In peer-to-peer networks, where there is no such cen‐

tral authority, Byzantine fault tolerance is more relevant.

A bug in the software could be regarded as a Byzantine fault, but if you deploy the

same software to all nodes, then a Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm cannot save you.

Most Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithms require a supermajority of more than two-

thirds of the nodes to be functioning correctly (i.e., if you have four nodes, at most

one may malfunction). To use this approach against bugs, you would have to have

four independent implementations of the same software and hope that a bug only

appears in one of the four implementations.

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies | 305

Similarly, it would be appealing if a protocol could protect us from vulnerabilities,

security compromises, and malicious attacks. Unfortunately, this is not realistic

either: in most systems, if an attacker can compromise one node, they can probably

compromise all of them, because they are probably running the same software. Thus,

traditional mechanisms (authentication, access control, encryption, firewalls, and so

on) continue to be the main protection against attackers.

Weak forms of lying

Although we assume that nodes are generally honest, it can be worth adding mecha‐

nisms to software that guard against weak forms of “lying”—for example, invalid

messages due to hardware issues, software bugs, and misconfiguration. Such protec‐

tion mechanisms are not full-blown Byzantine fault tolerance, as they would not

withstand a determined adversary, but they are nevertheless simple and pragmatic

steps toward better reliability. For example:

• Network packets do sometimes get corrupted due to hardware issues or bugs in

operating systems, drivers, routers, etc. Usually, corrupted packets are caught by

the checksums built into TCP and UDP, but sometimes they evade detection [85,

86, 87]. Simple measures are usually sufficient protection against such corrup‐

tion, such as checksums in the application-level protocol.

• A publicly accessible application must carefully sanitize any inputs from users,

for example checking that a value is within a reasonable range and limiting the

size of strings to prevent denial of service through large memory allocations. An

internal service behind a firewall may be able to get away with less strict checks

on inputs, but some basic sanity-checking of values (e.g., in protocol parsing

[85]) is a good idea.

• NTP clients can be configured with multiple server addresses. When synchroniz‐

ing, the client contacts all of them, estimates their errors, and checks that a

majority of servers agree on some time range. As long as most of the servers are

okay, a misconfigured NTP server that is reporting an incorrect time is detected

as an outlier and is excluded from synchronization [37]. The use of multiple

servers makes NTP more robust than if it only uses a single server.

System Model and Reality

Many algorithms have been designed to solve distributed systems problems—for

example, we will examine solutions for the consensus problem in Chapter 9. In order

to be useful, these algorithms need to tolerate the various faults of distributed systems

that we discussed in this chapter.

Algorithms need to be written in a way that does not depend too heavily on the

details of the hardware and software configuration on which they are run. This in

306 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

turn requires that we somehow formalize the kinds of faults that we expect to happen

in a system. We do this by defining a system model, which is an abstraction that

describes what things an algorithm may assume.

With regard to timing assumptions, three system models are in common use:

Synchronous model

The synchronous model assumes bounded network delay, bounded process pau‐

ses, and bounded clock error. This does not imply exactly synchronized clocks or

zero network delay; it just means you know that network delay, pauses, and clock

drift will never exceed some fixed upper bound [88]. The synchronous model is

not a realistic model of most practical systems, because (as discussed in this

chapter) unbounded delays and pauses do occur.

Partially synchronous model

Partial synchrony means that a system behaves like a synchronous system most of

the time, but it sometimes exceeds the bounds for network delay, process pauses,

and clock drift [88]. This is a realistic model of many systems: most of the time,

networks and processes are quite well behaved—otherwise we would never be

able to get anything done—but we have to reckon with the fact that any timing

assumptions may be shattered occasionally. When this happens, network delay,

pauses, and clock error may become arbitrarily large.

Asynchronous model

In this model, an algorithm is not allowed to make any timing assumptions—in

fact, it does not even have a clock (so it cannot use timeouts). Some algorithms

can be designed for the asynchronous model, but it is very restrictive.

Moreover, besides timing issues, we have to consider node failures. The three most

common system models for nodes are:

Crash-stop faults

In the crash-stop model, an algorithm may assume that a node can fail in only

one way, namely by crashing. This means that the node may suddenly stop

responding at any moment, and thereafter that node is gone forever—it never

comes back.

Crash-recovery faults

We assume that nodes may crash at any moment, and perhaps start responding

again after some unknown time. In the crash-recovery model, nodes are assumed

to have stable storage (i.e., nonvolatile disk storage) that is preserved across

crashes, while the in-memory state is assumed to be lost.

Byzantine (arbitrary) faults

Nodes may do absolutely anything, including trying to trick and deceive other

nodes, as described in the last section.

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies | 307

For modeling real systems, the partially synchronous model with crash-recovery

faults is generally the most useful model. But how do distributed algorithms cope

with that model?

Correctness of an algorithm

To define what it means for an algorithm to be correct, we can describe its properties.

For example, the output of a sorting algorithm has the property that for any two dis‐

tinct elements of the output list, the element further to the left is smaller than the ele‐

ment further to the right. That is simply a formal way of defining what it means for a

list to be sorted.

Similarly, we can write down the properties we want of a distributed algorithm to

define what it means to be correct. For example, if we are generating fencing tokens

for a lock (see “Fencing tokens” on page 303), we may require the algorithm to have

the following properties:

Uniqueness

No two requests for a fencing token return the same value.

Monotonic sequence

If request x returned token tx, and request y returned token ty, and x completed before y began, then tx < ty.

Availability

A node that requests a fencing token and does not crash eventually receives a

response.

An algorithm is correct in some system model if it always satisfies its properties in all

situations that we assume may occur in that system model. But how does this make

sense? If all nodes crash, or all network delays suddenly become infinitely long, then

no algorithm will be able to get anything done.

Safety and liveness

To clarify the situation, it is worth distinguishing between two different kinds of

properties: safety and liveness properties. In the example just given, uniqueness and monotonic sequence are safety properties, but availability is a liveness property.

What distinguishes the two kinds of properties? A giveaway is that liveness properties

often include the word “eventually” in their definition. (And yes, you guessed it—

eventual consistency is a liveness property [89].)

Safety is often informally defined as nothing bad happens, and liveness as something

good eventually happens. However, it’s best to not read too much into those informal

definitions, because the meaning of good and bad is subjective. The actual definitions

of safety and liveness are precise and mathematical [90]:

308 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

• If a safety property is violated, we can point at a particular point in time at which

it was broken (for example, if the uniqueness property was violated, we can iden‐

tify the particular operation in which a duplicate fencing token was returned).

After a safety property has been violated, the violation cannot be undone—the

damage is already done.

• A liveness property works the other way round: it may not hold at some point in

time (for example, a node may have sent a request but not yet received a

response), but there is always hope that it may be satisfied in the future (namely

by receiving a response).

An advantage of distinguishing between safety and liveness properties is that it helps

us deal with difficult system models. For distributed algorithms, it is common to

require that safety properties always hold, in all possible situations of a system model

[88]. That is, even if all nodes crash, or the entire network fails, the algorithm must

nevertheless ensure that it does not return a wrong result (i.e., that the safety proper‐

ties remain satisfied).

However, with liveness properties we are allowed to make caveats: for example, we

could say that a request needs to receive a response only if a majority of nodes have

not crashed, and only if the network eventually recovers from an outage. The defini‐

tion of the partially synchronous model requires that eventually the system returns to

a synchronous state—that is, any period of network interruption lasts only for a finite

duration and is then repaired.

Mapping system models to the real world

Safety and liveness properties and system models are very useful for reasoning about

the correctness of a distributed algorithm. However, when implementing an algo‐

rithm in practice, the messy facts of reality come back to bite you again, and it

becomes clear that the system model is a simplified abstraction of reality.

For example, algorithms in the crash-recovery model generally assume that data in

stable storage survives crashes. However, what happens if the data on disk is corrup‐

ted, or the data is wiped out due to hardware error or misconfiguration [91]? What

happens if a server has a firmware bug and fails to recognize its hard drives on

reboot, even though the drives are correctly attached to the server [92]?

Quorum algorithms (see “Quorums for reading and writing” on page 179) rely on a

node remembering the data that it claims to have stored. If a node may suffer from

amnesia and forget previously stored data, that breaks the quorum condition, and

thus breaks the correctness of the algorithm. Perhaps a new system model is needed,

in which we assume that stable storage mostly survives crashes, but may sometimes

be lost. But that model then becomes harder to reason about.

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies | 309

The theoretical description of an algorithm can declare that certain things are simply

assumed not to happen—and in non-Byzantine systems, we do have to make some

assumptions about faults that can and cannot happen. However, a real implementa‐

tion may still have to include code to handle the case where something happens that

was assumed to be impossible, even if that handling boils down to printf("Sucks to

be you") and exit(666)—i.e., letting a human operator clean up the mess [93].

(This is arguably the difference between computer science and software engineering.)

That is not to say that theoretical, abstract system models are worthless—quite the

opposite. They are incredibly helpful for distilling down the complexity of real sys‐

tems to a manageable set of faults that we can reason about, so that we can under‐

stand the problem and try to solve it systematically. We can prove algorithms correct

by showing that their properties always hold in some system model.

Proving an algorithm correct does not mean its implementation on a real system will

necessarily always behave correctly. But it’s a very good first step, because the theo‐

retical analysis can uncover problems in an algorithm that might remain hidden for a

long time in a real system, and that only come to bite you when your assumptions

(e.g., about timing) are defeated due to unusual circumstances. Theoretical analysis

and empirical testing are equally important.

Summary

In this chapter we have discussed a wide range of problems that can occur in dis‐

tributed systems, including:

• Whenever you try to send a packet over the network, it may be lost or arbitrarily

delayed. Likewise, the reply may be lost or delayed, so if you don’t get a reply,

you have no idea whether the message got through.

• A node’s clock may be significantly out of sync with other nodes (despite your

best efforts to set up NTP), it may suddenly jump forward or back in time, and

relying on it is dangerous because you most likely don’t have a good measure of

your clock’s error interval.

• A process may pause for a substantial amount of time at any point in its execu‐

tion (perhaps due to a stop-the-world garbage collector), be declared dead by

other nodes, and then come back to life again without realizing that it was

paused.

The fact that such partial failures can occur is the defining characteristic of dis‐

tributed systems. Whenever software tries to do anything involving other nodes,

there is the possibility that it may occasionally fail, or randomly go slow, or not

respond at all (and eventually time out). In distributed systems, we try to build toler‐

310 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

ance of partial failures into software, so that the system as a whole may continue

functioning even when some of its constituent parts are broken.

To tolerate faults, the first step is to detect them, but even that is hard. Most systems

don’t have an accurate mechanism of detecting whether a node has failed, so most

distributed algorithms rely on timeouts to determine whether a remote node is still

available. However, timeouts can’t distinguish between network and node failures,

and variable network delay sometimes causes a node to be falsely suspected of crash‐

ing. Moreover, sometimes a node can be in a degraded state: for example, a Gigabit

network interface could suddenly drop to 1 Kb/s throughput due to a driver bug [94].

Such a node that is “limping” but not dead can be even more difficult to deal with

than a cleanly failed node.

Once a fault is detected, making a system tolerate it is not easy either: there is no

global variable, no shared memory, no common knowledge or any other kind of

shared state between the machines. Nodes can’t even agree on what time it is, let

alone on anything more profound. The only way information can flow from one

node to another is by sending it over the unreliable network. Major decisions cannot

be safely made by a single node, so we require protocols that enlist help from other

nodes and try to get a quorum to agree.

If you’re used to writing software in the idealized mathematical perfection of a single

computer, where the same operation always deterministically returns the same result,

then moving to the messy physical reality of distributed systems can be a bit of a

shock. Conversely, distributed systems engineers will often regard a problem as triv‐

ial if it can be solved on a single computer [5], and indeed a single computer can do a

lot nowadays [95]. If you can avoid opening Pandora’s box and simply keep things on

a single machine, it is generally worth doing so.

However, as discussed in the introduction to Part II, scalability is not the only reason

for wanting to use a distributed system. Fault tolerance and low latency (by placing

data geographically close to users) are equally important goals, and those things can‐

not be achieved with a single node.

In this chapter we also went on some tangents to explore whether the unreliability of

networks, clocks, and processes is an inevitable law of nature. We saw that it isn’t: it

is possible to give hard real-time response guarantees and bounded delays in net‐

works, but doing so is very expensive and results in lower utilization of hardware

resources. Most non-safety-critical systems choose cheap and unreliable over expen‐

sive and reliable.

We also touched on supercomputers, which assume reliable components and thus

have to be stopped and restarted entirely when a component does fail. By contrast,

distributed systems can run forever without being interrupted at the service level,

because all faults and maintenance can be handled at the node level—at least in

Summary | 311

theory. (In practice, if a bad configuration change is rolled out to all nodes, that will

still bring a distributed system to its knees.)

This chapter has been all about problems, and has given us a bleak outlook. In the

next chapter we will move on to solutions, and discuss some algorithms that have

been designed to cope with all the problems in distributed systems.

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318 | Chapter 8: The Trouble with Distributed Systems

CHAPTER 9

Consistency and Consensus

Is it better to be alive and wrong or right and dead?

—Jay Kreps, A Few Notes on Kafka and Jepsen (2013)

Lots of things can go wrong in distributed systems, as discussed in Chapter 8. The

simplest way of handling such faults is to simply let the entire service fail, and show

the user an error message. If that solution is unacceptable, we need to find ways of

tolerating faults—that is, of keeping the service functioning correctly, even if some

internal component is faulty.

In this chapter, we will talk about some examples of algorithms and protocols for

building fault-tolerant distributed systems. We will assume that all the problems

from Chapter 8 can occur: packets can be lost, reordered, duplicated, or arbitrarily

delayed in the network; clocks are approximate at best; and nodes can pause (e.g., due

to garbage collection) or crash at any time.

The best way of building fault-tolerant systems is to find some general-purpose

abstractions with useful guarantees, implement them once, and then let applications

rely on those guarantees. This is the same approach as we used with transactions in

Chapter 7: by using a transaction, the application can pretend that there are no

crashes (atomicity), that nobody else is concurrently accessing the database (isola‐

tion), and that storage devices are perfectly reliable (durability). Even though crashes,

race conditions, and disk failures do occur, the transaction abstraction hides those

problems so that the application doesn’t need to worry about them.

We will now continue along the same lines, and seek abstractions that can allow an

application to ignore some of the problems with distributed systems. For example,

one of the most important abstractions for distributed systems is consensus: that is,

getting all of the nodes to agree on something. As we shall see in this chapter, reliably

321

reaching consensus in spite of network faults and process failures is a surprisingly

tricky problem.

Once you have an implementation of consensus, applications can use it for various

purposes. For example, say you have a database with single-leader replication. If the

leader dies and you need to fail over to another node, the remaining database nodes

can use consensus to elect a new leader. As discussed in “Handling Node Outages” on

page 156, it’s important that there is only one leader, and that all nodes agree who the

leader is. If two nodes both believe that they are the leader, that situation is called split

brain, and it often leads to data loss. Correct implementations of consensus help

avoid such problems.

Later in this chapter, in “Distributed Transactions and Consensus” on page 352, we

will look into algorithms to solve consensus and related problems. But first we first

need to explore the range of guarantees and abstractions that can be provided in a

distributed system.

We need to understand the scope of what can and cannot be done: in some situa‐

tions, it’s possible for the system to tolerate faults and continue working; in other sit‐

uations, that is not possible. The limits of what is and isn’t possible have been

explored in depth, both in theoretical proofs and in practical implementations. We

will get an overview of those fundamental limits in this chapter.

Researchers in the field of distributed systems have been studying these topics for

decades, so there is a lot of material—we’ll only be able to scratch the surface. In this

book we don’t have space to go into details of the formal models and proofs, so we

will stick with informal intuitions. The literature references offer plenty of additional

depth if you’re interested.

Consistency Guarantees

In “Problems with Replication Lag” on page 161 we looked at some timing issues that

occur in a replicated database. If you look at two database nodes at the same moment

in time, you’re likely to see different data on the two nodes, because write requests

arrive on different nodes at different times. These inconsistencies occur no matter

what replication method the database uses (single-leader, multi-leader, or leaderless

replication).

Most replicated databases provide at least eventual consistency, which means that if

you stop writing to the database and wait for some unspecified length of time, then

eventually all read requests will return the same value [1]. In other words, the incon‐

sistency is temporary, and it eventually resolves itself (assuming that any faults in the

network are also eventually repaired). A better name for eventual consistency may be

convergence, as we expect all replicas to eventually converge to the same value [2].

322 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

However, this is a very weak guarantee—it doesn’t say anything about when the replicas will converge. Until the time of convergence, reads could return anything or nothing [1]. For example, if you write a value and then immediately read it again,

there is no guarantee that you will see the value you just wrote, because the read may

be routed to a different replica (see “Reading Your Own Writes” on page 162).

Eventual consistency is hard for application developers because it is so different from

the behavior of variables in a normal single-threaded program. If you assign a value

to a variable and then read it shortly afterward, you don’t expect to read back the old

value, or for the read to fail. A database looks superficially like a variable that you can

read and write, but in fact it has much more complicated semantics [3].

When working with a database that provides only weak guarantees, you need to be

constantly aware of its limitations and not accidentally assume too much. Bugs are

often subtle and hard to find by testing, because the application may work well most

of the time. The edge cases of eventual consistency only become apparent when there

is a fault in the system (e.g., a network interruption) or at high concurrency.

In this chapter we will explore stronger consistency models that data systems may

choose to provide. They don’t come for free: systems with stronger guarantees may

have worse performance or be less fault-tolerant than systems with weaker guaran‐

tees. Nevertheless, stronger guarantees can be appealing because they are easier to use

correctly. Once you have seen a few different consistency models, you’ll be in a better

position to decide which one best fits your needs.

There is some similarity between distributed consistency models and the hierarchy of

transaction isolation levels we discussed previously [4, 5] (see “Weak Isolation Lev‐

els” on page 233). But while there is some overlap, they are mostly independent con‐

cerns: transaction isolation is primarily about avoiding race conditions due to

concurrently executing transactions, whereas distributed consistency is mostly about

coordinating the state of replicas in the face of delays and faults.

This chapter covers a broad range of topics, but as we shall see, these areas are in fact

deeply linked:

• We will start by looking at one of the strongest consistency models in common

use, linearizability, and examine its pros and cons.

• We’ll then examine the issue of ordering events in a distributed system (“Order‐

ing Guarantees” on page 339), particularly around causality and total ordering.

• In the third section (“Distributed Transactions and Consensus” on page 352) we

will explore how to atomically commit a distributed transaction, which will

finally lead us toward solutions for the consensus problem.

Consistency Guarantees | 323

Linearizability

In an eventually consistent database, if you ask two different replicas the same ques‐

tion at the same time, you may get two different answers. That’s confusing. Wouldn’t

it be a lot simpler if the database could give the illusion that there is only one replica

(i.e., only one copy of the data)? Then every client would have the same view of the

data, and you wouldn’t have to worry about replication lag.

This is the idea behind linearizability [6] (also known as atomic consistency [7], strong consistency, immediate consistency, or external consistency [8]). The exact definition of linearizability is quite subtle, and we will explore it in the rest of this section. But the basic idea is to make a system appear as if there were only one copy of the data,

and all operations on it are atomic. With this guarantee, even though there may be

multiple replicas in reality, the application does not need to worry about them.

In a linearizable system, as soon as one client successfully completes a write, all cli‐

ents reading from the database must be able to see the value just written. Maintaining

the illusion of a single copy of the data means guaranteeing that the value read is the

most recent, up-to-date value, and doesn’t come from a stale cache or replica. In

other words, linearizability is a recency guarantee. To clarify this idea, let’s look at an

example of a system that is not linearizable.

Figure 9-1. This system is not linearizable, causing football fans to be confused.

324 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Figure 9-1 shows an example of a nonlinearizable sports website [9]. Alice and Bob are sitting in the same room, both checking their phones to see the outcome of the 2014 FIFA World Cup final. Just after the final score is announced, Alice refreshes

the page, sees the winner announced, and excitedly tells Bob about it. Bob incredu‐

lously hits reload on his own phone, but his request goes to a database replica that is

lagging, and so his phone shows that the game is still ongoing.

If Alice and Bob had hit reload at the same time, it would have been less surprising if

they had gotten two different query results, because they wouldn’t know at exactly

what time their respective requests were processed by the server. However, Bob

knows that he hit the reload button (initiated his query) after he heard Alice exclaim

the final score, and therefore he expects his query result to be at least as recent as

Alice’s. The fact that his query returned a stale result is a violation of linearizability.

What Makes a System Linearizable?

The basic idea behind linearizability is simple: to make a system appear as if there is

only a single copy of the data. However, nailing down precisely what that means

actually requires some care. In order to understand linearizability better, let’s look at

some more examples.

Figure 9-2 shows three clients concurrently reading and writing the same key x in a linearizable database. In the distributed systems literature, x is called a register—in practice, it could be one key in a key-value store, one row in a relational database, or

one document in a document database, for example.

Figure 9-2. If a read request is concurrent with a write request, it may return either the

old or the new value.

For simplicity, Figure 9-2 shows only the requests from the clients’ point of view, not the internals of the database. Each bar is a request made by a client, where the start of a bar is the time when the request was sent, and the end of a bar is when the response

was received by the client. Due to variable network delays, a client doesn’t know

Linearizability | 325

exactly when the database processed its request—it only knows that it must have hap‐

pened sometime between the client sending the request and receiving the response.i

In this example, the register has two types of operations:

• read( x) ⇒ v means the client requested to read the value of register x, and the database returned the value v.

• write( x, v) ⇒ r means the client requested to set the register x to value v, and the database returned response r (which could be ok or error).

In Figure 9-2, the value of x is initially 0, and client C performs a write request to set it to 1. While this is happening, clients A and B are repeatedly polling the database to read the latest value. What are the possible responses that A and B might get for their

read requests?

• The first read operation by client A completes before the write begins, so it must

definitely return the old value 0.

• The last read by client A begins after the write has completed, so it must defi‐

nitely return the new value 1 if the database is linearizable: we know that the

write must have been processed sometime between the start and end of the write

operation, and the read must have been processed sometime between the start

and end of the read operation. If the read started after the write ended, then the

read must have been processed after the write, and therefore it must see the new

value that was written.

• Any read operations that overlap in time with the write operation might return

either 0 or 1, because we don’t know whether or not the write has taken effect at

the time when the read operation is processed. These operations are concurrent

with the write.

However, that is not yet sufficient to fully describe linearizability: if reads that are

concurrent with a write can return either the old or the new value, then readers could

see a value flip back and forth between the old and the new value several times while

a write is going on. That is not what we expect of a system that emulates a “single

copy of the data.”ii

i. A subtle detail of this diagram is that it assumes the existence of a global clock, represented by the horizontal axis. Even though real systems typically don’t have accurate clocks (see “Unreliable Clocks” on page 287),

this assumption is okay: for the purposes of analyzing a distributed algorithm, we may pretend that an accu‐

rate global clock exists, as long as the algorithm doesn’t have access to it [47]. Instead, the algorithm can only

see a mangled approximation of real time, as produced by a quartz oscillator and NTP.

ii. A register in which reads may return either the old or the new value if they are concurrent with a write is known as a regular register [7, 25].

326 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

To make the system linearizable, we need to add another constraint, illustrated in

Figure 9-3.

Figure 9-3. After any one read has returned the new value, all following reads (on the

same or other clients) must also return the new value.

In a linearizable system we imagine that there must be some point in time (between

the start and end of the write operation) at which the value of x atomically flips from

0 to 1. Thus, if one client’s read returns the new value 1, all subsequent reads must

also return the new value, even if the write operation has not yet completed.

This timing dependency is illustrated with an arrow in Figure 9-3. Client A is the first

to read the new value, 1. Just after A’s read returns, B begins a new read. Since B’s

read occurs strictly after A’s read, it must also return 1, even though the write by C is

still ongoing. (It’s the same situation as with Alice and Bob in Figure 9-1: after Alice has read the new value, Bob also expects to read the new value.) We can further refine this timing diagram to visualize each operation taking effect

atomically at some point in time. A more complex example is shown in Figure 9-4

[10].

In Figure 9-4 we add a third type of operation besides read and write:

• cas( x, v old, v new) ⇒ r means the client requested an atomic compare-and-set operation (see “Compare-and-set” on page 245). If the current value of the register x equals v old, it should be atomically set to v new. If x ≠ v old then the operation should leave the register unchanged and return an error. r is the database’s response ( ok or error).

Each operation in Figure 9-4 is marked with a vertical line (inside the bar for each

operation) at the time when we think the operation was executed. Those markers are

joined up in a sequential order, and the result must be a valid sequence of reads and

writes for a register (every read must return the value set by the most recent write).

The requirement of linearizability is that the lines joining up the operation markers

always move forward in time (from left to right), never backward. This requirement

Linearizability | 327

ensures the recency guarantee we discussed earlier: once a new value has been written

or read, all subsequent reads see the value that was written, until it is overwritten

again.

Figure 9-4. Visualizing the points in time at which the reads and writes appear to have

taken effect. The final read by B is not linearizable.

There are a few interesting details to point out in Figure 9-4:

• First client B sent a request to read x, then client D sent a request to set x to 0,

and then client A sent a request to set x to 1. Nevertheless, the value returned to

B’s read is 1 (the value written by A). This is okay: it means that the database first

processed D’s write, then A’s write, and finally B’s read. Although this is not the

order in which the requests were sent, it’s an acceptable order, because the three

requests are concurrent. Perhaps B’s read request was slightly delayed in the net‐

work, so it only reached the database after the two writes.

• Client B’s read returned 1 before client A received its response from the database,

saying that the write of the value 1 was successful. This is also okay: it doesn’t

mean the value was read before it was written, it just means the ok response from

the database to client A was slightly delayed in the network.

• This model doesn’t assume any transaction isolation: another client may change

a value at any time. For example, C first reads 1 and then reads 2, because the

value was changed by B between the two reads. An atomic compare-and-set ( cas)

operation can be used to check the value hasn’t been concurrently changed by

another client: B and C’s cas requests succeed, but D’s cas request fails (by the

time the database processes it, the value of x is no longer 0).

• The final read by client B (in a shaded bar) is not linearizable. The operation is

concurrent with C’s cas write, which updates x from 2 to 4. In the absence of

328 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

other requests, it would be okay for B’s read to return 2. However, client A has

already read the new value 4 before B’s read started, so B is not allowed to read

an older value than A. Again, it’s the same situation as with Alice and Bob in

Figure 9-1.

That is the intuition behind linearizability; the formal definition [6] describes it more precisely. It is possible (though computationally expensive) to test whether a system’s behavior is linearizable by recording the timings of all requests and responses, and

checking whether they can be arranged into a valid sequential order [11].

Linearizability Versus Serializability

Linearizability is easily confused with serializability (see “Serializability” on page 251), as both words seem to mean something like “can be arranged in a sequential order.”

However, they are two quite different guarantees, and it is important to distinguish

between them:

Serializability

Serializability is an isolation property of transactions, where every transaction

may read and write multiple objects (rows, documents, records)—see “Single-

Object and Multi-Object Operations” on page 228. It guarantees that transac‐

tions behave the same as if they had executed in some serial order (each

transaction running to completion before the next transaction starts). It is okay

for that serial order to be different from the order in which transactions were

actually run [12].

Linearizability

Linearizability is a recency guarantee on reads and writes of a register (an indi‐

vidual object). It doesn’t group operations together into transactions, so it does

not prevent problems such as write skew (see “Write Skew and Phantoms” on

page 246), unless you take additional measures such as materializing conflicts

(see “Materializing conflicts” on page 251).

A database may provide both serializability and linearizability, and this combination

is known as strict serializability or strong one-copy serializability ( strong-1SR) [4, 13].

Implementations of serializability based on two-phase locking (see “Two-Phase Lock‐

ing (2PL)” on page 257) or actual serial execution (see “Actual Serial Execution” on

page 252) are typically linearizable.

However, serializable snapshot isolation (see “Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)”

on page 261) is not linearizable: by design, it makes reads from a consistent snapshot, to avoid lock contention between readers and writers. The whole point of a consistent snapshot is that it does not include writes that are more recent than the snapshot, and

thus reads from the snapshot are not linearizable.

Linearizability | 329

Relying on Linearizability

In what circumstances is linearizability useful? Viewing the final score of a sporting

match is perhaps a frivolous example: a result that is outdated by a few seconds is

unlikely to cause any real harm in this situation. However, there a few areas in which

linearizability is an important requirement for making a system work correctly.

Locking and leader election

A system that uses single-leader replication needs to ensure that there is indeed only

one leader, not several (split brain). One way of electing a leader is to use a lock: every

node that starts up tries to acquire the lock, and the one that succeeds becomes the

leader [14]. No matter how this lock is implemented, it must be linearizable: all nodes

must agree which node owns the lock; otherwise it is useless.

Coordination services like Apache ZooKeeper [15] and etcd [16] are often used to

implement distributed locks and leader election. They use consensus algorithms to

implement linearizable operations in a fault-tolerant way (we discuss such algorithms

later in this chapter, in “Fault-Tolerant Consensus” on page 364).iii There are still

many subtle details to implementing locks and leader election correctly (see for

example the fencing issue in “The leader and the lock” on page 301), and libraries like

Apache Curator [17] help by providing higher-level recipes on top of ZooKeeper.

However, a linearizable storage service is the basic foundation for these coordination

tasks.

Distributed locking is also used at a much more granular level in some distributed

databases, such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) [18]. RAC uses a lock per

disk page, with multiple nodes sharing access to the same disk storage system. Since

these linearizable locks are on the critical path of transaction execution, RAC deploy‐

ments usually have a dedicated cluster interconnect network for communication

between database nodes.

Constraints and uniqueness guarantees

Uniqueness constraints are common in databases: for example, a username or email

address must uniquely identify one user, and in a file storage service there cannot be

two files with the same path and filename. If you want to enforce this constraint as

the data is written (such that if two people try to concurrently create a user or a file

with the same name, one of them will be returned an error), you need linearizability.

iii. Strictly speaking, ZooKeeper and etcd provide linearizable writes, but reads may be stale, since by default they can be served by any one of the replicas. You can optionally request a linearizable read: etcd calls this a quorum read [16], and in ZooKeeper you need to call sync() before the read [15]; see “Implementing linear‐

izable storage using total order broadcast” on page 350.

330 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

This situation is actually similar to a lock: when a user registers for your service, you

can think of them acquiring a “lock” on their chosen username. The operation is also

very similar to an atomic compare-and-set, setting the username to the ID of the user

who claimed it, provided that the username is not already taken.

Similar issues arise if you want to ensure that a bank account balance never goes neg‐

ative, or that you don’t sell more items than you have in stock in the warehouse, or

that two people don’t concurrently book the same seat on a flight or in a theater.

These constraints all require there to be a single up-to-date value (the account bal‐

ance, the stock level, the seat occupancy) that all nodes agree on.

In real applications, it is sometimes acceptable to treat such constraints loosely (for

example, if a flight is overbooked, you can move customers to a different flight and

offer them compensation for the inconvenience). In such cases, linearizability may

not be needed, and we will discuss such loosely interpreted constraints in “Timeliness

and Integrity” on page 524.

However, a hard uniqueness constraint, such as the one you typically find in rela‐

tional databases, requires linearizability. Other kinds of constraints, such as foreign

key or attribute constraints, can be implemented without requiring linearizability

[19].

Cross-channel timing dependencies

Notice a detail in Figure 9-1: if Alice hadn’t exclaimed the score, Bob wouldn’t have

known that the result of his query was stale. He would have just refreshed the page

again a few seconds later, and eventually seen the final score. The linearizability viola‐

tion was only noticed because there was an additional communication channel in the

system (Alice’s voice to Bob’s ears).

Similar situations can arise in computer systems. For example, say you have a website

where users can upload a photo, and a background process resizes the photos to

lower resolution for faster download (thumbnails). The architecture and dataflow of

this system is illustrated in Figure 9-5.

The image resizer needs to be explicitly instructed to perform a resizing job, and this

instruction is sent from the web server to the resizer via a message queue (see Chap‐

ter 11). The web server doesn’t place the entire photo on the queue, since most mes‐

sage brokers are designed for small messages, and a photo may be several megabytes

in size. Instead, the photo is first written to a file storage service, and once the write is

complete, the instruction to the resizer is placed on the queue.

Linearizability | 331

Figure 9-5. The web server and image resizer communicate both through file storage

and a message queue, opening the potential for race conditions.

If the file storage service is linearizable, then this system should work fine. If it is not

linearizable, there is the risk of a race condition: the message queue (steps 3 and 4 in

Figure 9-5) might be faster than the internal replication inside the storage service. In

this case, when the resizer fetches the image (step 5), it might see an old version of the

image, or nothing at all. If it processes an old version of the image, the full-size and

resized images in the file storage become permanently inconsistent.

This problem arises because there are two different communication channels

between the web server and the resizer: the file storage and the message queue.

Without the recency guarantee of linearizability, race conditions between these two

channels are possible. This situation is analogous to Figure 9-1, where there was also

a race condition between two communication channels: the database replication and

the real-life audio channel between Alice’s mouth and Bob’s ears.

Linearizability is not the only way of avoiding this race condition, but it’s the simplest

to understand. If you control the additional communication channel (like in the case

of the message queue, but not in the case of Alice and Bob), you can use alternative

approaches similar to what we discussed in “Reading Your Own Writes” on page 162,

at the cost of additional complexity.

Implementing Linearizable Systems

Now that we’ve looked at a few examples in which linearizability is useful, let’s think

about how we might implement a system that offers linearizable semantics.

Since linearizability essentially means “behave as though there is only a single copy of

the data, and all operations on it are atomic,” the simplest answer would be to really

only use a single copy of the data. However, that approach would not be able to toler‐

ate faults: if the node holding that one copy failed, the data would be lost, or at least

inaccessible until the node was brought up again.

332 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

The most common approach to making a system fault-tolerant is to use replication.

Let’s revisit the replication methods from Chapter 5, and compare whether they can

be made linearizable:

Single-leader replication (potentially linearizable)

In a system with single-leader replication (see “Leaders and Followers” on page

152), the leader has the primary copy of the data that is used for writes, and the

followers maintain backup copies of the data on other nodes. If you make reads

from the leader, or from synchronously updated followers, they have the poten‐

tial to be linearizable.iv However, not every single-leader database is actually line‐

arizable, either by design (e.g., because it uses snapshot isolation) or due to

concurrency bugs [10].

Using the leader for reads relies on the assumption that you know for sure who

the leader is. As discussed in “The Truth Is Defined by the Majority” on page

300, it is quite possible for a node to think that it is the leader, when in fact it is

not—and if the delusional leader continues to serve requests, it is likely to violate

linearizability [20]. With asynchronous replication, failover may even lose com‐

mitted writes (see “Handling Node Outages” on page 156), which violates both

durability and linearizability.

Consensus algorithms (linearizable)

Some consensus algorithms, which we will discuss later in this chapter, bear a

resemblance to single-leader replication. However, consensus protocols contain

measures to prevent split brain and stale replicas. Thanks to these details, con‐

sensus algorithms can implement linearizable storage safely. This is how Zoo‐

Keeper [21] and etcd [22] work, for example.

Multi-leader replication (not linearizable)

Systems with multi-leader replication are generally not linearizable, because they

concurrently process writes on multiple nodes and asynchronously replicate

them to other nodes. For this reason, they can produce conflicting writes that

require resolution (see “Handling Write Conflicts” on page 171). Such conflicts

are an artifact of the lack of a single copy of the data.

Leaderless replication (probably not linearizable)

For systems with leaderless replication (Dynamo-style; see “Leaderless Replica‐

tion” on page 177), people sometimes claim that you can obtain “strong consis‐

tency” by requiring quorum reads and writes ( w + r > n). Depending on the exact

iv. Partitioning (sharding) a single-leader database, so that there is a separate leader per partition, does not affect linearizability, since it is only a single-object guarantee. Cross-partition transactions are a different mat‐

ter (see “Distributed Transactions and Consensus” on page 352).

Linearizability | 333

configuration of the quorums, and depending on how you define strong consis‐

tency, this is not quite true.

“Last write wins” conflict resolution methods based on time-of-day clocks (e.g.,

in Cassandra; see “Relying on Synchronized Clocks” on page 291) are almost cer‐

tainly nonlinearizable, because clock timestamps cannot be guaranteed to be

consistent with actual event ordering due to clock skew. Sloppy quorums

(“Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff” on page 183) also ruin any chance of

linearizability. Even with strict quorums, nonlinearizable behavior is possible, as

demonstrated in the next section.

Linearizability and quorums

Intuitively, it seems as though strict quorum reads and writes should be linearizable

in a Dynamo-style model. However, when we have variable network delays, it is pos‐

sible to have race conditions, as demonstrated in Figure 9-6.

Figure 9-6. A nonlinearizable execution, despite using a strict quorum.

In Figure 9-6, the initial value of x is 0, and a writer client is updating x to 1 by sending the write to all three replicas ( n = 3, w = 3). Concurrently, client A reads from a quorum of two nodes ( r = 2) and sees the new value 1 on one of the nodes. Also con‐

currently with the write, client B reads from a different quorum of two nodes, and

gets back the old value 0 from both.

The quorum condition is met ( w + r > n), but this execution is nevertheless not linearizable: B’s request begins after A’s request completes, but B returns the old value 334 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

while A returns the new value. (It’s once again the Alice and Bob situation from

Figure 9-1.)

Interestingly, it is possible to make Dynamo-style quorums linearizable at the cost of

reduced performance: a reader must perform read repair (see “Read repair and anti-

entropy” on page 178) synchronously, before returning results to the application

[23], and a writer must read the latest state of a quorum of nodes before sending its

writes [24, 25]. However, Riak does not perform synchronous read repair due to the

performance penalty [26]. Cassandra does wait for read repair to complete on quorum reads [27], but it loses linearizability if there are multiple concurrent writes to

the same key, due to its use of last-write-wins conflict resolution.

Moreover, only linearizable read and write operations can be implemented in this

way; a linearizable compare-and-set operation cannot, because it requires a consen‐

sus algorithm [28].

In summary, it is safest to assume that a leaderless system with Dynamo-style replica‐

tion does not provide linearizability.

The Cost of Linearizability

As some replication methods can provide linearizability and others cannot, it is inter‐

esting to explore the pros and cons of linearizability in more depth.

We already discussed some use cases for different replication methods in Chapter 5;

for example, we saw that multi-leader replication is often a good choice for multi-

datacenter replication (see “Multi-datacenter operation” on page 168). An example of

such a deployment is illustrated in Figure 9-7.

Figure 9-7. A network interruption forcing a choice between linearizability and availa‐

bility.

Linearizability | 335

Consider what happens if there is a network interruption between the two datacen‐

ters. Let’s assume that the network within each datacenter is working, and clients can

reach the datacenters, but the datacenters cannot connect to each other.

With a multi-leader database, each datacenter can continue operating normally: since

writes from one datacenter are asynchronously replicated to the other, the writes are

simply queued up and exchanged when network connectivity is restored.

On the other hand, if single-leader replication is used, then the leader must be in one

of the datacenters. Any writes and any linearizable reads must be sent to the leader—

thus, for any clients connected to a follower datacenter, those read and write requests

must be sent synchronously over the network to the leader datacenter.

If the network between datacenters is interrupted in a single-leader setup, clients con‐

nected to follower datacenters cannot contact the leader, so they cannot make any

writes to the database, nor any linearizable reads. They can still make reads from the

follower, but they might be stale (nonlinearizable). If the application requires linear‐

izable reads and writes, the network interruption causes the application to become

unavailable in the datacenters that cannot contact the leader.

If clients can connect directly to the leader datacenter, this is not a problem, since the

application continues to work normally there. But clients that can only reach a fol‐

lower datacenter will experience an outage until the network link is repaired.

The CAP theorem

This issue is not just a consequence of single-leader and multi-leader replication: any

linearizable database has this problem, no matter how it is implemented. The issue

also isn’t specific to multi-datacenter deployments, but can occur on any unreliable

network, even within one datacenter. The trade-off is as follows:v

• If your application requires linearizability, and some replicas are disconnected

from the other replicas due to a network problem, then some replicas cannot

process requests while they are disconnected: they must either wait until the net‐

work problem is fixed, or return an error (either way, they become unavailable).

• If your application does not require linearizability, then it can be written in a way

that each replica can process requests independently, even if it is disconnected

from other replicas (e.g., multi-leader). In this case, the application can remain

available in the face of a network problem, but its behavior is not linearizable.

v. These two choices are sometimes known as CP (consistent but not available under network partitions) and

AP (available but not consistent under network partitions), respectively. However, this classification scheme has several flaws [9], so it is best avoided.

336 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Thus, applications that don’t require linearizability can be more tolerant of network

problems. This insight is popularly known as the CAP theorem [29, 30, 31, 32],

named by Eric Brewer in 2000, although the trade-off has been known to designers of

distributed databases since the 1970s [33, 34, 35, 36].

CAP was originally proposed as a rule of thumb, without precise definitions, with the

goal of starting a discussion about trade-offs in databases. At the time, many dis‐

tributed databases focused on providing linearizable semantics on a cluster of

machines with shared storage [18], and CAP encouraged database engineers to

explore a wider design space of distributed shared-nothing systems, which were more

suitable for implementing large-scale web services [37]. CAP deserves credit for this

culture shift—witness the explosion of new database technologies since the

mid-2000s (known as NoSQL).

The Unhelpful CAP Theorem

CAP is sometimes presented as Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance: pick 2

out of 3. Unfortunately, putting it this way is misleading [32] because network partitions are a kind of fault, so they aren’t something about which you have a choice: they will happen whether you like it or not [38].

At times when the network is working correctly, a system can provide both consis‐

tency (linearizability) and total availability. When a network fault occurs, you have to

choose between either linearizability or total availability. Thus, a better way of phras‐

ing CAP would be either Consistent or Available when Partitioned [39]. A more relia‐

ble network needs to make this choice less often, but at some point the choice is

inevitable.

In discussions of CAP there are several contradictory definitions of the term availa‐

bility, and the formalization as a theorem [30] does not match its usual meaning [40].

Many so-called “highly available” (fault-tolerant) systems actually do not meet CAP’s

idiosyncratic definition of availability. All in all, there is a lot of misunderstanding

and confusion around CAP, and it does not help us understand systems better, so

CAP is best avoided.

The CAP theorem as formally defined [30] is of very narrow scope: it only considers

one consistency model (namely linearizability) and one kind of fault ( network parti‐

tions,vi or nodes that are alive but disconnected from each other). It doesn’t say any‐

vi. As discussed in “Network Faults in Practice” on page 279, this book uses partitioning to refer to deliberately breaking down a large dataset into smaller ones ( sharding; see Chapter 6). By contrast, a network parti‐

tion is a particular type of network fault, which we normally don’t consider separately from other kinds of faults. However, since it’s the P in CAP, we can’t avoid the confusion in this case.

Linearizability | 337

thing about network delays, dead nodes, or other trade-offs. Thus, although CAP has

been historically influential, it has little practical value for designing systems [9, 40].

There are many more interesting impossibility results in distributed systems [41],

and CAP has now been superseded by more precise results [2, 42], so it is of mostly

historical interest today.

Linearizability and network delays

Although linearizability is a useful guarantee, surprisingly few systems are actually

linearizable in practice. For example, even RAM on a modern multi-core CPU is not

linearizable [43]: if a thread running on one CPU core writes to a memory address,

and a thread on another CPU core reads the same address shortly afterward, it is not

guaranteed to read the value written by the first thread (unless a memory barrier or

fence [44] is used).

The reason for this behavior is that every CPU core has its own memory cache and

store buffer. Memory access first goes to the cache by default, and any changes are

asynchronously written out to main memory. Since accessing data in the cache is

much faster than going to main memory [45], this feature is essential for good per‐

formance on modern CPUs. However, there are now several copies of the data (one

in main memory, and perhaps several more in various caches), and these copies are

asynchronously updated, so linearizability is lost.

Why make this trade-off? It makes no sense to use the CAP theorem to justify the

multi-core memory consistency model: within one computer we usually assume reli‐

able communication, and we don’t expect one CPU core to be able to continue oper‐

ating normally if it is disconnected from the rest of the computer. The reason for

dropping linearizability is performance, not fault tolerance.

The same is true of many distributed databases that choose not to provide lineariza‐

ble guarantees: they do so primarily to increase performance, not so much for fault

tolerance [46]. Linearizability is slow—and this is true all the time, not only during a network fault.

Can’t we maybe find a more efficient implementation of linearizable storage? It

seems the answer is no: Attiya and Welch [47] prove that if you want linearizability,

the response time of read and write requests is at least proportional to the uncertainty

of delays in the network. In a network with highly variable delays, like most com‐

puter networks (see “Timeouts and Unbounded Delays” on page 281), the response

time of linearizable reads and writes is inevitably going to be high. A faster algorithm

for linearizability does not exist, but weaker consistency models can be much faster,

so this trade-off is important for latency-sensitive systems. In Chapter 12 we will discuss some approaches for avoiding linearizability without sacrificing correctness.

338 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Ordering Guarantees

We said previously that a linearizable register behaves as if there is only a single copy

of the data, and that every operation appears to take effect atomically at one point in

time. This definition implies that operations are executed in some well-defined order.

We illustrated the ordering in Figure 9-4 by joining up the operations in the order in

which they seem to have executed.

Ordering has been a recurring theme in this book, which suggests that it might be an

important fundamental idea. Let’s briefly recap some of the other contexts in which

we have discussed ordering:

• In Chapter 5 we saw that the main purpose of the leader in single-leader replica‐

tion is to determine the order of writes in the replication log—that is, the order in

which followers apply those writes. If there is no single leader, conflicts can occur

due to concurrent operations (see “Handling Write Conflicts” on page 171).

• Serializability, which we discussed in Chapter 7, is about ensuring that transac‐

tions behave as if they were executed in some sequential order. It can be achieved

by literally executing transactions in that serial order, or by allowing concurrent

execution while preventing serialization conflicts (by locking or aborting).

• The use of timestamps and clocks in distributed systems that we discussed in

Chapter 8 (see “Relying on Synchronized Clocks” on page 291) is another

attempt to introduce order into a disorderly world, for example to determine

which one of two writes happened later.

It turns out that there are deep connections between ordering, linearizability, and

consensus. Although this notion is a bit more theoretical and abstract than the rest of

this book, it is very helpful for clarifying our understanding of what systems can and

cannot do. We will explore this topic in the next few sections.

Ordering and Causality

There are several reasons why ordering keeps coming up, and one of the reasons is

that it helps preserve causality. We have already seen several examples over the

course of this book where causality has been important:

• In “Consistent Prefix Reads” on page 165 (Figure 5-5) we saw an example where

the observer of a conversation saw first the answer to a question, and then the

question being answered. This is confusing because it violates our intuition of

cause and effect: if a question is answered, then clearly the question had to be

there first, because the person giving the answer must have seen the question

(assuming they are not psychic and cannot see into the future). We say that there

is a causal dependency between the question and the answer.

Ordering Guarantees | 339

• A similar pattern appeared in Figure 5-9, where we looked at the replication

between three leaders and noticed that some writes could “overtake” others due

to network delays. From the perspective of one of the replicas it would look as

though there was an update to a row that did not exist. Causality here means that

a row must first be created before it can be updated.

• In “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184 we observed that if you have two

operations A and B, there are three possibilities: either A happened before B, or B

happened before A, or A and B are concurrent. This happened before relationship

is another expression of causality: if A happened before B, that means B might

have known about A, or built upon A, or depended on A. If A and B are concur‐

rent, there is no causal link between them; in other words, we are sure that nei‐

ther knew about the other.

• In the context of snapshot isolation for transactions (“Snapshot Isolation and

Repeatable Read” on page 237), we said that a transaction reads from a consistent

snapshot. But what does “consistent” mean in this context? It means consistent

with causality: if the snapshot contains an answer, it must also contain the ques‐

tion being answered [48]. Observing the entire database at a single point in time

makes it consistent with causality: the effects of all operations that happened cau‐

sally before that point in time are visible, but no operations that happened cau‐

sally afterward can be seen. Read skew (non-repeatable reads, as illustrated in

Figure 7-6) means reading data in a state that violates causality.

• Our examples of write skew between transactions (see “Write Skew and Phan‐

toms” on page 246) also demonstrated causal dependencies: in Figure 7-8, Alice was allowed to go off call because the transaction thought that Bob was still on call, and vice versa. In this case, the action of going off call is causally dependent

on the observation of who is currently on call. Serializable snapshot isolation (see

“Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)” on page 261) detects write skew by track‐

ing the causal dependencies between transactions.

• In the example of Alice and Bob watching football (Figure 9-1), the fact that Bob

got a stale result from the server after hearing Alice exclaim the result is a causal‐

ity violation: Alice’s exclamation is causally dependent on the announcement of

the score, so Bob should also be able to see the score after hearing Alice. The

same pattern appeared again in “Cross-channel timing dependencies” on page

331 in the guise of an image resizing service.

Causality imposes an ordering on events: cause comes before effect; a message is sent

before that message is received; the question comes before the answer. And, like in

real life, one thing leads to another: one node reads some data and then writes some‐

thing as a result, another node reads the thing that was written and writes something

else in turn, and so on. These chains of causally dependent operations define the

causal order in the system—i.e., what happened before what.

340 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

If a system obeys the ordering imposed by causality, we say that it is causally consistent. For example, snapshot isolation provides causal consistency: when you read from the database, and you see some piece of data, then you must also be able to see

any data that causally precedes it (assuming it has not been deleted in the meantime).

The causal order is not a total order

A total order allows any two elements to be compared, so if you have two elements,

you can always say which one is greater and which one is smaller. For example, natu‐

ral numbers are totally ordered: if I give you any two numbers, say 5 and 13, you can

tell me that 13 is greater than 5.

However, mathematical sets are not totally ordered: is { a, b} greater than { b, c}? Well, you can’t really compare them, because neither is a subset of the other. We say they are incomparable, and therefore mathematical sets are partially ordered: in some cases

one set is greater than another (if one set contains all the elements of another), but in

other cases they are incomparable.

The difference between a total order and a partial order is reflected in different data‐

base consistency models:

Linearizability

In a linearizable system, we have a total order of operations: if the system behaves

as if there is only a single copy of the data, and every operation is atomic, this

means that for any two operations we can always say which one happened first.

This total ordering is illustrated as a timeline in Figure 9-4.

Causality

We said that two operations are concurrent if neither happened before the other

(see “The “happens-before” relationship and concurrency” on page 186). Put

another way, two events are ordered if they are causally related (one happened

before the other), but they are incomparable if they are concurrent. This means

that causality defines a partial order, not a total order: some operations are

ordered with respect to each other, but some are incomparable.

Therefore, according to this definition, there are no concurrent operations in a line‐

arizable datastore: there must be a single timeline along which all operations are

totally ordered. There might be several requests waiting to be handled, but the data‐

store ensures that every request is handled atomically at a single point in time, acting

on a single copy of the data, along a single timeline, without any concurrency.

Concurrency would mean that the timeline branches and merges again—and in this

case, operations on different branches are incomparable (i.e., concurrent). We saw

this phenomenon in Chapter 5: for example, Figure 5-14 is not a straight-line total

order, but rather a jumble of different operations going on concurrently. The arrows

in the diagram indicate causal dependencies—the partial ordering of operations.

Ordering Guarantees | 341

If you are familiar with distributed version control systems such as Git, their version

histories are very much like the graph of causal dependencies. Often one commit

happens after another, in a straight line, but sometimes you get branches (when sev‐

eral people concurrently work on a project), and merges are created when those con‐

currently created commits are combined.

Linearizability is stronger than causal consistency

So what is the relationship between the causal order and linearizability? The answer is

that linearizability implies causality: any system that is linearizable will preserve cau‐

sality correctly [7]. In particular, if there are multiple communication channels in a

system (such as the message queue and the file storage service in Figure 9-5), lineariz‐

ability ensures that causality is automatically preserved without the system having to

do anything special (such as passing around timestamps between different compo‐

nents).

The fact that linearizability ensures causality is what makes linearizable systems sim‐

ple to understand and appealing. However, as discussed in “The Cost of Linearizabil‐

ity” on page 335, making a system linearizable can harm its performance and

availability, especially if the system has significant network delays (for example, if it’s

geographically distributed). For this reason, some distributed data systems have

abandoned linearizability, which allows them to achieve better performance but can

make them difficult to work with.

The good news is that a middle ground is possible. Linearizability is not the only way

of preserving causality—there are other ways too. A system can be causally consistent

without incurring the performance hit of making it linearizable (in particular, the

CAP theorem does not apply). In fact, causal consistency is the strongest possible

consistency model that does not slow down due to network delays, and remains

available in the face of network failures [2, 42].

In many cases, systems that appear to require linearizability in fact only really require

causal consistency, which can be implemented more efficiently. Based on this obser‐

vation, researchers are exploring new kinds of databases that preserve causality, with

performance and availability characteristics that are similar to those of eventually

consistent systems [49, 50, 51].

As this research is quite recent, not much of it has yet made its way into production

systems, and there are still challenges to be overcome [52, 53]. However, it is a prom‐

ising direction for future systems.

Capturing causal dependencies

We won’t go into all the nitty-gritty details of how nonlinearizable systems can main‐

tain causal consistency here, but just briefly explore some of the key ideas.

342 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

In order to maintain causality, you need to know which operation happened before

which other operation. This is a partial order: concurrent operations may be pro‐

cessed in any order, but if one operation happened before another, then they must be

processed in that order on every replica. Thus, when a replica processes an operation,

it must ensure that all causally preceding operations (all operations that happened

before) have already been processed; if some preceding operation is missing, the later

operation must wait until the preceding operation has been processed.

In order to determine causal dependencies, we need some way of describing the

“knowledge” of a node in the system. If a node had already seen the value X when it

issued the write Y, then X and Y may be causally related. The analysis uses the kinds

of questions you would expect in a criminal investigation of fraud charges: did the

CEO know about X at the time when they made decision Y?

The techniques for determining which operation happened before which other oper‐

ation are similar to what we discussed in “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184.

That section discussed causality in a leaderless datastore, where we need to detect

concurrent writes to the same key in order to prevent lost updates. Causal consis‐

tency goes further: it needs to track causal dependencies across the entire database,

not just for a single key. Version vectors can be generalized to do this [54].

In order to determine the causal ordering, the database needs to know which version

of the data was read by the application. This is why, in Figure 5-13, the version num‐

ber from the prior operation is passed back to the database on a write. A similar idea

appears in the conflict detection of SSI, as discussed in “Serializable Snapshot Isola‐

tion (SSI)” on page 261: when a transaction wants to commit, the database checks

whether the version of the data that it read is still up to date. To this end, the database

keeps track of which data has been read by which transaction.

Sequence Number Ordering

Although causality is an important theoretical concept, actually keeping track of all

causal dependencies can become impractical. In many applications, clients read lots

of data before writing something, and then it is not clear whether the write is causally

dependent on all or only some of those prior reads. Explicitly tracking all the data

that has been read would mean a large overhead.

However, there is a better way: we can use sequence numbers or timestamps to order

events. A timestamp need not come from a time-of-day clock (or physical clock,

which have many problems, as discussed in “Unreliable Clocks” on page 287). It can

instead come from a logical clock, which is an algorithm to generate a sequence of

numbers to identify operations, typically using counters that are incremented for

every operation.

Ordering Guarantees | 343

Such sequence numbers or timestamps are compact (only a few bytes in size), and

they provide a total order: that is, every operation has a unique sequence number, and

you can always compare two sequence numbers to determine which is greater (i.e.,

which operation happened later).

In particular, we can create sequence numbers in a total order that is consistent with

causality:vii we promise that if operation A causally happened before B, then A occurs

before B in the total order (A has a lower sequence number than B). Concurrent

operations may be ordered arbitrarily. Such a total order captures all the causality

information, but also imposes more ordering than strictly required by causality.

In a database with single-leader replication (see “Leaders and Followers” on page

152), the replication log defines a total order of write operations that is consistent

with causality. The leader can simply increment a counter for each operation, and

thus assign a monotonically increasing sequence number to each operation in the

replication log. If a follower applies the writes in the order they appear in the replica‐

tion log, the state of the follower is always causally consistent (even if it is lagging

behind the leader).

Noncausal sequence number generators

If there is not a single leader (perhaps because you are using a multi-leader or leader‐

less database, or because the database is partitioned), it is less clear how to generate

sequence numbers for operations. Various methods are used in practice:

• Each node can generate its own independent set of sequence numbers. For exam‐

ple, if you have two nodes, one node can generate only odd numbers and the

other only even numbers. In general, you could reserve some bits in the binary

representation of the sequence number to contain a unique node identifier, and

this would ensure that two different nodes can never generate the same sequence

number.

• You can attach a timestamp from a time-of-day clock (physical clock) to each

operation [55]. Such timestamps are not sequential, but if they have sufficiently

high resolution, they might be sufficient to totally order operations. This fact is

used in the last write wins conflict resolution method (see “Timestamps for

ordering events” on page 291).

• You can preallocate blocks of sequence numbers. For example, node A might

claim the block of sequence numbers from 1 to 1,000, and node B might claim

vii. A total order that is inconsistent with causality is easy to create, but not very useful. For example, you can generate a random UUID for each operation, and compare UUIDs lexicographically to define the total ordering of operations. This is a valid total order, but the random UUIDs tell you nothing about which operation actually happened first, or whether the operations were concurrent.

344 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

the block from 1,001 to 2,000. Then each node can independently assign

sequence numbers from its block, and allocate a new block when its supply of

sequence numbers begins to run low.

These three options all perform better and are more scalable than pushing all opera‐

tions through a single leader that increments a counter. They generate a unique,

approximately increasing sequence number for each operation. However, they all

have a problem: the sequence numbers they generate are not consistent with causality.

The causality problems occur because these sequence number generators do not cor‐

rectly capture the ordering of operations across different nodes:

• Each node may process a different number of operations per second. Thus, if one

node generates even numbers and the other generates odd numbers, the counter

for even numbers may lag behind the counter for odd numbers, or vice versa. If

you have an odd-numbered operation and an even-numbered operation, you

cannot accurately tell which one causally happened first.

• Timestamps from physical clocks are subject to clock skew, which can make

them inconsistent with causality. For example, see Figure 8-3, which shows a sce‐

nario in which an operation that happened causally later was actually assigned a

lower timestamp.viii

• In the case of the block allocator, one operation may be given a sequence number

in the range from 1,001 to 2,000, and a causally later operation may be given a

number in the range from 1 to 1,000. Here, again, the sequence number is incon‐

sistent with causality.

Lamport timestamps

Although the three sequence number generators just described are inconsistent with

causality, there is actually a simple method for generating sequence numbers that is

consistent with causality. It is called a Lamport timestamp, proposed in 1978 by Leslie

Lamport [56], in what is now one of the most-cited papers in the field of distributed

systems.

The use of Lamport timestamps is illustrated in Figure 9-8. Each node has a unique

identifier, and each node keeps a counter of the number of operations it has pro‐

cessed. The Lamport timestamp is then simply a pair of ( counter, node ID). Two

viii. It is possible to make physical clock timestamps consistent with causality: in “Synchronized clocks for

global snapshots” on page 294 we discussed Google’s Spanner, which estimates the expected clock skew and

waits out the uncertainty interval before committing a write. This method ensures that a causally later transaction is given a greater timestamp. However, most clocks cannot provide the required uncertainty metric.

Ordering Guarantees | 345

nodes may sometimes have the same counter value, but by including the node ID in

the timestamp, each timestamp is made unique.

Figure 9-8. Lamport timestamps provide a total ordering consistent with causality.

A Lamport timestamp bears no relationship to a physical time-of-day clock, but it

provides total ordering: if you have two timestamps, the one with a greater counter

value is the greater timestamp; if the counter values are the same, the one with the

greater node ID is the greater timestamp.

So far this description is essentially the same as the even/odd counters described in

the last section. The key idea about Lamport timestamps, which makes them consis‐

tent with causality, is the following: every node and every client keeps track of the

maximum counter value it has seen so far, and includes that maximum on every

request. When a node receives a request or response with a maximum counter value

greater than its own counter value, it immediately increases its own counter to that

maximum.

This is shown in Figure 9-8, where client A receives a counter value of 5 from node 2,

and then sends that maximum of 5 to node 1. At that time, node 1’s counter was only

1, but it was immediately moved forward to 5, so the next operation had an incre‐

mented counter value of 6.

As long as the maximum counter value is carried along with every operation, this

scheme ensures that the ordering from the Lamport timestamps is consistent with

causality, because every causal dependency results in an increased timestamp.

Lamport timestamps are sometimes confused with version vectors, which we saw in

“Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184. Although there are some similarities,

they have a different purpose: version vectors can distinguish whether two operations

are concurrent or whether one is causally dependent on the other, whereas Lamport

timestamps always enforce a total ordering. From the total ordering of Lamport time‐

346 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

stamps, you cannot tell whether two operations are concurrent or whether they are

causally dependent. The advantage of Lamport timestamps over version vectors is

that they are more compact.

Timestamp ordering is not sufficient

Although Lamport timestamps define a total order of operations that is consistent

with causality, they are not quite sufficient to solve many common problems in dis‐

tributed systems.

For example, consider a system that needs to ensure that a username uniquely identi‐

fies a user account. If two users concurrently try to create an account with the same

username, one of the two should succeed and the other should fail. (We touched on

this problem previously in “The leader and the lock” on page 301.)

At first glance, it seems as though a total ordering of operations (e.g., using Lamport

timestamps) should be sufficient to solve this problem: if two accounts with the same

username are created, pick the one with the lower timestamp as the winner (the one

who grabbed the username first), and let the one with the greater timestamp fail.

Since timestamps are totally ordered, this comparison is always valid.

This approach works for determining the winner after the fact: once you have collec‐

ted all the username creation operations in the system, you can compare their time‐

stamps. However, it is not sufficient when a node has just received a request from a

user to create a username, and needs to decide right now whether the request should

succeed or fail. At that moment, the node does not know whether another node is

concurrently in the process of creating an account with the same username, and what

timestamp that other node may assign to the operation.

In order to be sure that no other node is in the process of concurrently creating an

account with the same username and a lower timestamp, you would have to check

with every other node to see what it is doing [56]. If one of the other nodes has failed or cannot be reached due to a network problem, this system would grind to a halt.

This is not the kind of fault-tolerant system that we need.

The problem here is that the total order of operations only emerges after you have

collected all of the operations. If another node has generated some operations, but

you don’t yet know what they are, you cannot construct the final ordering of opera‐

tions: the unknown operations from the other node may need to be inserted at vari‐

ous positions in the total order.

To conclude: in order to implement something like a uniqueness constraint for user‐

names, it’s not sufficient to have a total ordering of operations—you also need to

know when that order is finalized. If you have an operation to create a username, and

you are sure that no other node can insert a claim for the same username ahead of

your operation in the total order, then you can safely declare the operation successful.

Ordering Guarantees | 347

This idea of knowing when your total order is finalized is captured in the topic of

total order broadcast.

Total Order Broadcast

If your program runs only on a single CPU core, it is easy to define a total ordering of

operations: it is simply the order in which they were executed by the CPU. However,

in a distributed system, getting all nodes to agree on the same total ordering of opera‐

tions is tricky. In the last section we discussed ordering by timestamps or sequence

numbers, but found that it is not as powerful as single-leader replication (if you use

timestamp ordering to implement a uniqueness constraint, you cannot tolerate any

faults).

As discussed, single-leader replication determines a total order of operations by

choosing one node as the leader and sequencing all operations on a single CPU core

on the leader. The challenge then is how to scale the system if the throughput is

greater than a single leader can handle, and also how to handle failover if the leader

fails (see “Handling Node Outages” on page 156). In the distributed systems litera‐

ture, this problem is known as total order broadcast or atomic broadcast [25, 57, 58].ix Scope of ordering guarantee Partitioned databases with a single leader per partition often main‐

tain ordering only per partition, which means they cannot offer

consistency guarantees (e.g., consistent snapshots, foreign key ref‐

erences) across partitions. Total ordering across all partitions is

possible, but requires additional coordination [59].

Total order broadcast is usually described as a protocol for exchanging messages

between nodes. Informally, it requires that two safety properties always be satisfied:

Reliable delivery

No messages are lost: if a message is delivered to one node, it is delivered to all

nodes.

Totally ordered delivery

Messages are delivered to every node in the same order.

A correct algorithm for total order broadcast must ensure that the reliability and

ordering properties are always satisfied, even if a node or the network is faulty. Of

ix. The term atomic broadcast is traditional, but it is very confusing as it’s inconsistent with other uses of the word atomic: it has nothing to do with atomicity in ACID transactions and is only indirectly related to atomic operations (in the sense of multi-threaded programming) or atomic registers (linearizable storage). The term total order multicast is another synonym.

348 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

course, messages will not be delivered while the network is interrupted, but an algo‐

rithm can keep retrying so that the messages get through when the network is even‐

tually repaired (and then they must still be delivered in the correct order).

Using total order broadcast

Consensus services such as ZooKeeper and etcd actually implement total order

broadcast. This fact is a hint that there is a strong connection between total order

broadcast and consensus, which we will explore later in this chapter.

Total order broadcast is exactly what you need for database replication: if every mes‐

sage represents a write to the database, and every replica processes the same writes in

the same order, then the replicas will remain consistent with each other (aside from

any temporary replication lag). This principle is known as state machine replication

[60], and we will return to it in Chapter 11.

Similarly, total order broadcast can be used to implement serializable transactions: as

discussed in “Actual Serial Execution” on page 252, if every message represents a

deterministic transaction to be executed as a stored procedure, and if every node pro‐

cesses those messages in the same order, then the partitions and replicas of the data‐

base are kept consistent with each other [61].

An important aspect of total order broadcast is that the order is fixed at the time the

messages are delivered: a node is not allowed to retroactively insert a message into an

earlier position in the order if subsequent messages have already been delivered. This

fact makes total order broadcast stronger than timestamp ordering.

Another way of looking at total order broadcast is that it is a way of creating a log (as

in a replication log, transaction log, or write-ahead log): delivering a message is like

appending to the log. Since all nodes must deliver the same messages in the same

order, all nodes can read the log and see the same sequence of messages.

Total order broadcast is also useful for implementing a lock service that provides

fencing tokens (see “Fencing tokens” on page 303). Every request to acquire the lock

is appended as a message to the log, and all messages are sequentially numbered in

the order they appear in the log. The sequence number can then serve as a fencing

token, because it is monotonically increasing. In ZooKeeper, this sequence number is

called zxid [15].

Ordering Guarantees | 349

Implementing linearizable storage using total order broadcast

As illustrated in Figure 9-4, in a linearizable system there is a total order of opera‐

tions. Does that mean linearizability is the same as total order broadcast? Not quite,

but there are close links between the two.x

Total order broadcast is asynchronous: messages are guaranteed to be delivered relia‐

bly in a fixed order, but there is no guarantee about when a message will be delivered

(so one recipient may lag behind the others). By contrast, linearizability is a recency

guarantee: a read is guaranteed to see the latest value written.

However, if you have total order broadcast, you can build linearizable storage on top

of it. For example, you can ensure that usernames uniquely identify user accounts.

Imagine that for every possible username, you can have a linearizable register with an

atomic compare-and-set operation. Every register initially has the value null (indi‐

cating that the username is not taken). When a user wants to create a username, you

execute a compare-and-set operation on the register for that username, setting it to

the user account ID, under the condition that the previous register value is null. If

multiple users try to concurrently grab the same username, only one of the compare-

and-set operations will succeed, because the others will see a value other than null

(due to linearizability).

You can implement such a linearizable compare-and-set operation as follows by

using total order broadcast as an append-only log [62, 63]:

1. Append a message to the log, tentatively indicating the username you want to

claim.

2. Read the log, and wait for the message you appended to be delivered back to

you.xi

3. Check for any messages claiming the username that you want. If the first message

for your desired username is your own message, then you are successful: you can

commit the username claim (perhaps by appending another message to the log)

and acknowledge it to the client. If the first message for your desired username is

from another user, you abort the operation.

x. In a formal sense, a linearizable read-write register is an “easier” problem. Total order broadcast is equiva‐

lent to consensus [67], which has no deterministic solution in the asynchronous crash-stop model [68],

whereas a linearizable read-write register can be implemented in the same system model [23, 24, 25]. How‐

ever, supporting atomic operations such as compare-and-set or increment-and-get in a register makes it

equivalent to consensus [28]. Thus, the problems of consensus and a linearizable register are closely related.

xi. If you don’t wait, but acknowledge the write immediately after it has been enqueued, you get something

similar to the memory consistency model of multi-core x86 processors [43]. That model is neither linearizable nor sequentially consistent.

350 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Because log entries are delivered to all nodes in the same order, if there are several

concurrent writes, all nodes will agree on which one came first. Choosing the first of

the conflicting writes as the winner and aborting later ones ensures that all nodes

agree on whether a write was committed or aborted. A similar approach can be used

to implement serializable multi-object transactions on top of a log [62].

While this procedure ensures linearizable writes, it doesn’t guarantee linearizable

reads—if you read from a store that is asynchronously updated from the log, it may

be stale. (To be precise, the procedure described here provides sequential consistency

[47, 64], sometimes also known as timeline consistency [65, 66], a slightly weaker guarantee than linearizability.) To make reads linearizable, there are a few options: • You can sequence reads through the log by appending a message, reading the log,

and performing the actual read when the message is delivered back to you. The

message’s position in the log thus defines the point in time at which the read

happens. (Quorum reads in etcd work somewhat like this [16].)

• If the log allows you to fetch the position of the latest log message in a lineariza‐

ble way, you can query that position, wait for all entries up to that position to be

delivered to you, and then perform the read. (This is the idea behind Zoo‐

Keeper’s sync() operation [15].)

• You can make your read from a replica that is synchronously updated on writes,

and is thus sure to be up to date. (This technique is used in chain replication

[63]; see also “Research on Replication” on page 155.)

Implementing total order broadcast using linearizable storage

The last section showed how to build a linearizable compare-and-set operation from

total order broadcast. We can also turn it around, assume that we have linearizable

storage, and show how to build total order broadcast from it.

The easiest way is to assume you have a linearizable register that stores an integer and

that has an atomic increment-and-get operation [28]. Alternatively, an atomic

compare-and-set operation would also do the job.

The algorithm is simple: for every message you want to send through total order

broadcast, you increment-and-get the linearizable integer, and then attach the value

you got from the register as a sequence number to the message. You can then send

the message to all nodes (resending any lost messages), and the recipients will deliver

the messages consecutively by sequence number.

Note that unlike Lamport timestamps, the numbers you get from incrementing the

linearizable register form a sequence with no gaps. Thus, if a node has delivered mes‐

sage 4 and receives an incoming message with a sequence number of 6, it knows that

it must wait for message 5 before it can deliver message 6. The same is not the case

Ordering Guarantees | 351

with Lamport timestamps—in fact, this is the key difference between total order

broadcast and timestamp ordering.

How hard could it be to make a linearizable integer with an atomic increment-and-

get operation? As usual, if things never failed, it would be easy: you could just keep it

in a variable on one node. The problem lies in handling the situation when network

connections to that node are interrupted, and restoring the value when that node fails

[59]. In general, if you think hard enough about linearizable sequence number gener‐

ators, you inevitably end up with a consensus algorithm.

This is no coincidence: it can be proved that a linearizable compare-and-set (or

increment-and-get) register and total order broadcast are both equivalent to consen‐

sus [28, 67]. That is, if you can solve one of these problems, you can transform it into a solution for the others. This is quite a profound and surprising insight!

It is time to finally tackle the consensus problem head-on, which we will do in the

rest of this chapter.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus

Consensus is one of the most important and fundamental problems in distributed

computing. On the surface, it seems simple: informally, the goal is simply to get sev‐

eral nodes to agree on something. You might think that this shouldn’t be too hard.

Unfortunately, many broken systems have been built in the mistaken belief that this

problem is easy to solve.

Although consensus is very important, the section about it appears late in this book

because the topic is quite subtle, and appreciating the subtleties requires some pre‐

requisite knowledge. Even in the academic research community, the understanding

of consensus only gradually crystallized over the course of decades, with many mis‐

understandings along the way. Now that we have discussed replication (Chapter 5),

transactions (Chapter 7), system models (Chapter 8), linearizability, and total order

broadcast (this chapter), we are finally ready to tackle the consensus problem.

There are a number of situations in which it is important for nodes to agree. For

example:

Leader election

In a database with single-leader replication, all nodes need to agree on which

node is the leader. The leadership position might become contested if some

nodes can’t communicate with others due to a network fault. In this case, con‐

sensus is important to avoid a bad failover, resulting in a split brain situation in

which two nodes both believe themselves to be the leader (see “Handling Node

Outages” on page 156). If there were two leaders, they would both accept writes

and their data would diverge, leading to inconsistency and data loss.

352 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Atomic commit

In a database that supports transactions spanning several nodes or partitions, we

have the problem that a transaction may fail on some nodes but succeed on oth‐

ers. If we want to maintain transaction atomicity (in the sense of ACID; see

“Atomicity” on page 223), we have to get all nodes to agree on the outcome of the

transaction: either they all abort/roll back (if anything goes wrong) or they all

commit (if nothing goes wrong). This instance of consensus is known as the

atomic commit problem.xii

The Impossibility of Consensus

You may have heard about the FLP result [68]—named after the authors Fischer,

Lynch, and Paterson—which proves that there is no algorithm that is always able to

reach consensus if there is a risk that a node may crash. In a distributed system, we

must assume that nodes may crash, so reliable consensus is impossible. Yet, here we

are, discussing algorithms for achieving consensus. What is going on here?

The answer is that the FLP result is proved in the asynchronous system model (see

“System Model and Reality” on page 306), a very restrictive model that assumes a

deterministic algorithm that cannot use any clocks or timeouts. If the algorithm is

allowed to use timeouts, or some other way of identifying suspected crashed nodes

(even if the suspicion is sometimes wrong), then consensus becomes solvable [67].

Even just allowing the algorithm to use random numbers is sufficient to get around

the impossibility result [69].

Thus, although the FLP result about the impossibility of consensus is of great theoret‐

ical importance, distributed systems can usually achieve consensus in practice.

In this section we will first examine the atomic commit problem in more detail. In

particular, we will discuss the two-phase commit (2PC) algorithm, which is the most

common way of solving atomic commit and which is implemented in various data‐

bases, messaging systems, and application servers. It turns out that 2PC is a kind of

consensus algorithm—but not a very good one [70, 71].

By learning from 2PC we will then work our way toward better consensus algorithms,

such as those used in ZooKeeper (Zab) and etcd (Raft).

xii. Atomic commit is formalized slightly differently from consensus: an atomic transaction can commit only if all participants vote to commit, and must abort if any participant needs to abort. Consensus is allowed to decide on any value that is proposed by one of the participants. However, atomic commit and consensus are reducible to each other [70, 71]. Nonblocking atomic commit is harder than consensus—see “Three-phase

commit” on page 359.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 353

Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)

In Chapter 7 we learned that the purpose of transaction atomicity is to provide sim‐

ple semantics in the case where something goes wrong in the middle of making sev‐

eral writes. The outcome of a transaction is either a successful commit, in which case

all of the transaction’s writes are made durable, or an abort, in which case all of the

transaction’s writes are rolled back (i.e., undone or discarded).

Atomicity prevents failed transactions from littering the database with half-finished

results and half-updated state. This is especially important for multi-object transac‐

tions (see “Single-Object and Multi-Object Operations” on page 228) and databases

that maintain secondary indexes. Each secondary index is a separate data structure

from the primary data—thus, if you modify some data, the corresponding change

needs to also be made in the secondary index. Atomicity ensures that the secondary

index stays consistent with the primary data (if the index became inconsistent with

the primary data, it would not be very useful).

From single-node to distributed atomic commit

For transactions that execute at a single database node, atomicity is commonly imple‐

mented by the storage engine. When the client asks the database node to commit the

transaction, the database makes the transaction’s writes durable (typically in a write-

ahead log; see “Making B-trees reliable” on page 82) and then appends a commit

record to the log on disk. If the database crashes in the middle of this process, the

transaction is recovered from the log when the node restarts: if the commit record

was successfully written to disk before the crash, the transaction is considered com‐

mitted; if not, any writes from that transaction are rolled back.

Thus, on a single node, transaction commitment crucially depends on the order in

which data is durably written to disk: first the data, then the commit record [72]. The key deciding moment for whether the transaction commits or aborts is the moment at which the disk finishes writing the commit record: before that moment, it is still

possible to abort (due to a crash), but after that moment, the transaction is commit‐

ted (even if the database crashes). Thus, it is a single device (the controller of one par‐

ticular disk drive, attached to one particular node) that makes the commit atomic.

However, what if multiple nodes are involved in a transaction? For example, perhaps

you have a multi-object transaction in a partitioned database, or a term-partitioned

secondary index (in which the index entry may be on a different node from the pri‐

mary data; see “Partitioning and Secondary Indexes” on page 206). Most “NoSQL”

distributed datastores do not support such distributed transactions, but various clus‐

tered relational systems do (see “Distributed Transactions in Practice” on page 360).

In these cases, it is not sufficient to simply send a commit request to all of the nodes

and independently commit the transaction on each one. In doing so, it could easily

354 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

happen that the commit succeeds on some nodes and fails on other nodes, which

would violate the atomicity guarantee:

• Some nodes may detect a constraint violation or conflict, making an abort neces‐

sary, while other nodes are successfully able to commit.

• Some of the commit requests might be lost in the network, eventually aborting

due to a timeout, while other commit requests get through.

• Some nodes may crash before the commit record is fully written and roll back on

recovery, while others successfully commit.

If some nodes commit the transaction but others abort it, the nodes become inconsis‐

tent with each other (like in Figure 7-3). And once a transaction has been committed

on one node, it cannot be retracted again if it later turns out that it was aborted on

another node. For this reason, a node must only commit once it is certain that all

other nodes in the transaction are also going to commit.

A transaction commit must be irrevocable—you are not allowed to change your

mind and retroactively abort a transaction after it has been committed. The reason

for this rule is that once data has been committed, it becomes visible to other transac‐

tions, and thus other clients may start relying on that data; this principle forms the

basis of read committed isolation, discussed in “Read Committed” on page 234. If a transaction was allowed to abort after committing, any transactions that read the committed data would be based on data that was retroactively declared not to have

existed—so they would have to be reverted as well.

(It is possible for the effects of a committed transaction to later be undone by

another, compensating transaction [73, 74]. However, from the database’s point of view this is a separate transaction, and thus any cross-transaction correctness requirements are the application’s problem.)

Introduction to two-phase commit

Two-phase commit is an algorithm for achieving atomic transaction commit across

multiple nodes—i.e., to ensure that either all nodes commit or all nodes abort. It is a

classic algorithm in distributed databases [13, 35, 75]. 2PC is used internally in some databases and also made available to applications in the form of XA transactions [76, 77] (which are supported by the Java Transaction API, for example) or via WS-

AtomicTransaction for SOAP web services [78, 79].

The basic flow of 2PC is illustrated in Figure 9-9. Instead of a single commit request, as with a single-node transaction, the commit/abort process in 2PC is split into two phases (hence the name).

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 355

Figure 9-9. A successful execution of two-phase commit (2PC).

Don’t confuse 2PC and 2PL

Two-phase commit (2PC) and two-phase locking (see “Two-Phase

Locking (2PL)” on page 257) are two very different things. 2PC

provides atomic commit in a distributed database, whereas 2PL

provides serializable isolation. To avoid confusion, it’s best to think

of them as entirely separate concepts and to ignore the unfortunate

similarity in the names.

2PC uses a new component that does not normally appear in single-node transac‐

tions: a coordinator (also known as transaction manager). The coordinator is often

implemented as a library within the same application process that is requesting the

transaction (e.g., embedded in a Java EE container), but it can also be a separate pro‐

cess or service. Examples of such coordinators include Narayana, JOTM, BTM, or

MSDTC.

A 2PC transaction begins with the application reading and writing data on multiple

database nodes, as normal. We call these database nodes participants in the transac‐

tion. When the application is ready to commit, the coordinator begins phase 1: it

sends a prepare request to each of the nodes, asking them whether they are able to

commit. The coordinator then tracks the responses from the participants:

• If all participants reply “yes,” indicating they are ready to commit, then the coor‐

dinator sends out a commit request in phase 2, and the commit actually takes

place.

• If any of the participants replies “no,” the coordinator sends an abort request to

all nodes in phase 2.

This process is somewhat like the traditional marriage ceremony in Western cultures:

the minister asks the bride and groom individually whether each wants to marry the

other, and typically receives the answer “I do” from both. After receiving both

356 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

acknowledgments, the minister pronounces the couple husband and wife: the trans‐

action is committed, and the happy fact is broadcast to all attendees. If either bride or

groom does not say “yes,” the ceremony is aborted [73].

A system of promises

From this short description it might not be clear why two-phase commit ensures

atomicity, while one-phase commit across several nodes does not. Surely the prepare

and commit requests can just as easily be lost in the two-phase case. What makes 2PC

different?

To understand why it works, we have to break down the process in a bit more detail:

1. When the application wants to begin a distributed transaction, it requests a

transaction ID from the coordinator. This transaction ID is globally unique.

2. The application begins a single-node transaction on each of the participants, and

attaches the globally unique transaction ID to the single-node transaction. All

reads and writes are done in one of these single-node transactions. If anything

goes wrong at this stage (for example, a node crashes or a request times out), the

coordinator or any of the participants can abort.

3. When the application is ready to commit, the coordinator sends a prepare

request to all participants, tagged with the global transaction ID. If any of these

requests fails or times out, the coordinator sends an abort request for that trans‐

action ID to all participants.

4. When a participant receives the prepare request, it makes sure that it can defi‐

nitely commit the transaction under all circumstances. This includes writing all

transaction data to disk (a crash, a power failure, or running out of disk space is

not an acceptable excuse for refusing to commit later), and checking for any con‐

flicts or constraint violations. By replying “yes” to the coordinator, the node

promises to commit the transaction without error if requested. In other words,

the participant surrenders the right to abort the transaction, but without actually

committing it.

5. When the coordinator has received responses to all prepare requests, it makes a

definitive decision on whether to commit or abort the transaction (committing

only if all participants voted “yes”). The coordinator must write that decision to

its transaction log on disk so that it knows which way it decided in case it subse‐

quently crashes. This is called the commit point.

6. Once the coordinator’s decision has been written to disk, the commit or abort

request is sent to all participants. If this request fails or times out, the coordinator

must retry forever until it succeeds. There is no more going back: if the decision

was to commit, that decision must be enforced, no matter how many retries it

takes. If a participant has crashed in the meantime, the transaction will be com‐

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 357

mitted when it recovers—since the participant voted “yes,” it cannot refuse to

commit when it recovers.

Thus, the protocol contains two crucial “points of no return”: when a participant

votes “yes,” it promises that it will definitely be able to commit later (although the

coordinator may still choose to abort); and once the coordinator decides, that deci‐

sion is irrevocable. Those promises ensure the atomicity of 2PC. (Single-node atomic

commit lumps these two events into one: writing the commit record to the transac‐

tion log.)

Returning to the marriage analogy, before saying “I do,” you and your bride/groom

have the freedom to abort the transaction by saying “No way!” (or something to that

effect). However, after saying “I do,” you cannot retract that statement. If you faint

after saying “I do” and you don’t hear the minister speak the words “You are now

husband and wife,” that doesn’t change the fact that the transaction was committed.

When you recover consciousness later, you can find out whether you are married or

not by querying the minister for the status of your global transaction ID, or you can

wait for the minister’s next retry of the commit request (since the retries will have

continued throughout your period of unconsciousness).

Coordinator failure

We have discussed what happens if one of the participants or the network fails during

2PC: if any of the prepare requests fail or time out, the coordinator aborts the trans‐

action; if any of the commit or abort requests fail, the coordinator retries them indefi‐

nitely. However, it is less clear what happens if the coordinator crashes.

If the coordinator fails before sending the prepare requests, a participant can safely

abort the transaction. But once the participant has received a prepare request and

voted “yes,” it can no longer abort unilaterally—it must wait to hear back from the

coordinator whether the transaction was committed or aborted. If the coordinator

crashes or the network fails at this point, the participant can do nothing but wait. A

participant’s transaction in this state is called in doubt or uncertain.

The situation is illustrated in Figure 9-10. In this particular example, the coordinator

actually decided to commit, and database 2 received the commit request. However,

the coordinator crashed before it could send the commit request to database 1, and so

database 1 does not know whether to commit or abort. Even a timeout does not help

here: if database 1 unilaterally aborts after a timeout, it will end up inconsistent with

database 2, which has committed. Similarly, it is not safe to unilaterally commit,

because another participant may have aborted.

358 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Figure 9-10. The coordinator crashes after participants vote “yes.” Database 1 does not

know whether to commit or abort.

Without hearing from the coordinator, the participant has no way of knowing

whether to commit or abort. In principle, the participants could communicate among

themselves to find out how each participant voted and come to some agreement, but

that is not part of the 2PC protocol.

The only way 2PC can complete is by waiting for the coordinator to recover. This is

why the coordinator must write its commit or abort decision to a transaction log on

disk before sending commit or abort requests to participants: when the coordinator

recovers, it determines the status of all in-doubt transactions by reading its transac‐

tion log. Any transactions that don’t have a commit record in the coordinator’s log

are aborted. Thus, the commit point of 2PC comes down to a regular single-node

atomic commit on the coordinator.

Three-phase commit

Two-phase commit is called a blocking atomic commit protocol due to the fact that

2PC can become stuck waiting for the coordinator to recover. In theory, it is possible

to make an atomic commit protocol nonblocking, so that it does not get stuck if a

node fails. However, making this work in practice is not so straightforward.

As an alternative to 2PC, an algorithm called three-phase commit (3PC) has been pro‐

posed [13, 80]. However, 3PC assumes a network with bounded delay and nodes with

bounded response times; in most practical systems with unbounded network delay

and process pauses (see Chapter 8), it cannot guarantee atomicity.

In general, nonblocking atomic commit requires a perfect failure detector [67, 71]— i.e., a reliable mechanism for telling whether a node has crashed or not. In a network

with unbounded delay a timeout is not a reliable failure detector, because a request

may time out due to a network problem even if no node has crashed. For this reason,

2PC continues to be used, despite the known problem with coordinator failure.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 359

Distributed Transactions in Practice

Distributed transactions, especially those implemented with two-phase commit, have

a mixed reputation. On the one hand, they are seen as providing an important safety

guarantee that would be hard to achieve otherwise; on the other hand, they are criti‐

cized for causing operational problems, killing performance, and promising more

than they can deliver [81, 82, 83, 84]. Many cloud services choose not to implement distributed transactions due to the operational problems they engender [85, 86].

Some implementations of distributed transactions carry a heavy performance penalty

—for example, distributed transactions in MySQL are reported to be over 10 times

slower than single-node transactions [87], so it is not surprising when people advise

against using them. Much of the performance cost inherent in two-phase commit is

due to the additional disk forcing (fsync) that is required for crash recovery [88], and the additional network round-trips.

However, rather than dismissing distributed transactions outright, we should exam‐

ine them in some more detail, because there are important lessons to be learned from

them. To begin, we should be precise about what we mean by “distributed transac‐

tions.” Two quite different types of distributed transactions are often conflated:

Database-internal distributed transactions

Some distributed databases (i.e., databases that use replication and partitioning

in their standard configuration) support internal transactions among the nodes

of that database. For example, VoltDB and MySQL Cluster’s NDB storage engine

have such internal transaction support. In this case, all the nodes participating in

the transaction are running the same database software.

Heterogeneous distributed transactions

In a heterogeneous transaction, the participants are two or more different tech‐

nologies: for example, two databases from different vendors, or even non-

database systems such as message brokers. A distributed transaction across these

systems must ensure atomic commit, even though the systems may be entirely

different under the hood.

Database-internal transactions do not have to be compatible with any other system,

so they can use any protocol and apply optimizations specific to that particular tech‐

nology. For that reason, database-internal distributed transactions can often work

quite well. On the other hand, transactions spanning heterogeneous technologies are

a lot more challenging.

Exactly-once message processing

Heterogeneous distributed transactions allow diverse systems to be integrated in

powerful ways. For example, a message from a message queue can be acknowledged

as processed if and only if the database transaction for processing the message was

360 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

successfully committed. This is implemented by atomically committing the message

acknowledgment and the database writes in a single transaction. With distributed

transaction support, this is possible, even if the message broker and the database are

two unrelated technologies running on different machines.

If either the message delivery or the database transaction fails, both are aborted, and

so the message broker may safely redeliver the message later. Thus, by atomically

committing the message and the side effects of its processing, we can ensure that the

message is effectively processed exactly once, even if it required a few retries before it

succeeded. The abort discards any side effects of the partially completed transaction.

Such a distributed transaction is only possible if all systems affected by the transac‐

tion are able to use the same atomic commit protocol, however. For example, say a

side effect of processing a message is to send an email, and the email server does not

support two-phase commit: it could happen that the email is sent two or more times

if message processing fails and is retried. But if all side effects of processing a message

are rolled back on transaction abort, then the processing step can safely be retried as

if nothing had happened.

We will return to the topic of exactly-once message processing in Chapter 11. Let’s

look first at the atomic commit protocol that allows such heterogeneous distributed

transactions.

XA transactions

X/Open XA (short for eXtended Architecture) is a standard for implementing two-

phase commit across heterogeneous technologies [76, 77]. It was introduced in 1991

and has been widely implemented: XA is supported by many traditional relational

databases (including PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle) and mes‐

sage brokers (including ActiveMQ, HornetQ, MSMQ, and IBM MQ).

XA is not a network protocol—it is merely a C API for interfacing with a transaction

coordinator. Bindings for this API exist in other languages; for example, in the world

of Java EE applications, XA transactions are implemented using the Java Transaction

API (JTA), which in turn is supported by many drivers for databases using Java Data‐

base Connectivity (JDBC) and drivers for message brokers using the Java Message

Service (JMS) APIs.

XA assumes that your application uses a network driver or client library to commu‐

nicate with the participant databases or messaging services. If the driver supports XA,

that means it calls the XA API to find out whether an operation should be part of a

distributed transaction—and if so, it sends the necessary information to the database

server. The driver also exposes callbacks through which the coordinator can ask the

participant to prepare, commit, or abort.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 361

The transaction coordinator implements the XA API. The standard does not specify

how it should be implemented, but in practice the coordinator is often simply a

library that is loaded into the same process as the application issuing the transaction

(not a separate service). It keeps track of the participants in a transaction, collects

partipants’ responses after asking them to prepare (via a callback into the driver), and

uses a log on the local disk to keep track of the commit/abort decision for each trans‐

action.

If the application process crashes, or the machine on which the application is running

dies, the coordinator goes with it. Any participants with prepared but uncommitted

transactions are then stuck in doubt. Since the coordinator’s log is on the application

server’s local disk, that server must be restarted, and the coordinator library must

read the log to recover the commit/abort outcome of each transaction. Only then can

the coordinator use the database driver’s XA callbacks to ask participants to commit

or abort, as appropriate. The database server cannot contact the coordinator directly,

since all communication must go via its client library.

Holding locks while in doubt

Why do we care so much about a transaction being stuck in doubt? Can’t the rest of

the system just get on with its work, and ignore the in-doubt transaction that will be

cleaned up eventually?

The problem is with locking. As discussed in “Read Committed” on page 234, data‐

base transactions usually take a row-level exclusive lock on any rows they modify, to

prevent dirty writes. In addition, if you want serializable isolation, a database using

two-phase locking would also have to take a shared lock on any rows read by the

transaction (see “Two-Phase Locking (2PL)” on page 257).

The database cannot release those locks until the transaction commits or aborts

(illustrated as a shaded area in Figure 9-9). Therefore, when using two-phase commit,

a transaction must hold onto the locks throughout the time it is in doubt. If the coor‐

dinator has crashed and takes 20 minutes to start up again, those locks will be held

for 20 minutes. If the coordinator’s log is entirely lost for some reason, those locks

will be held forever—or at least until the situation is manually resolved by an admin‐

istrator.

While those locks are held, no other transaction can modify those rows. Depending

on the database, other transactions may even be blocked from reading those rows.

Thus, other transactions cannot simply continue with their business—if they want to

access that same data, they will be blocked. This can cause large parts of your applica‐

tion to become unavailable until the in-doubt transaction is resolved.

362 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Recovering from coordinator failure

In theory, if the coordinator crashes and is restarted, it should cleanly recover its state

from the log and resolve any in-doubt transactions. However, in practice, orphaned

in-doubt transactions do occur [89, 90]—that is, transactions for which the coordina‐

tor cannot decide the outcome for whatever reason (e.g., because the transaction log

has been lost or corrupted due to a software bug). These transactions cannot be

resolved automatically, so they sit forever in the database, holding locks and blocking

other transactions.

Even rebooting your database servers will not fix this problem, since a correct imple‐

mentation of 2PC must preserve the locks of an in-doubt transaction even across

restarts (otherwise it would risk violating the atomicity guarantee). It’s a sticky

situation.

The only way out is for an administrator to manually decide whether to commit or

roll back the transactions. The administrator must examine the participants of each

in-doubt transaction, determine whether any participant has committed or aborted

already, and then apply the same outcome to the other participants. Resolving the

problem potentially requires a lot of manual effort, and most likely needs to be done

under high stress and time pressure during a serious production outage (otherwise,

why would the coordinator be in such a bad state?).

Many XA implementations have an emergency escape hatch called heuristic decisions:

allowing a participant to unilaterally decide to abort or commit an in-doubt transac‐

tion without a definitive decision from the coordinator [76, 77, 91]. To be clear, heuristic here is a euphemism for probably breaking atomicity, since it violates the system of promises in two-phase commit. Thus, heuristic decisions are intended only for

getting out of catastrophic situations, and not for regular use.

Limitations of distributed transactions

XA transactions solve the real and important problem of keeping several participant

data systems consistent with each other, but as we have seen, they also introduce

major operational problems. In particular, the key realization is that the transaction

coordinator is itself a kind of database (in which transaction outcomes are stored),

and so it needs to be approached with the same care as any other important database:

• If the coordinator is not replicated but runs only on a single machine, it is a sin‐

gle point of failure for the entire system (since its failure causes other application

servers to block on locks held by in-doubt transactions). Surprisingly, many

coordinator implementations are not highly available by default, or have only

rudimentary replication support.

• Many server-side applications are developed in a stateless model (as favored by

HTTP), with all persistent state stored in a database, which has the advantage

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 363

that application servers can be added and removed at will. However, when the

coordinator is part of the application server, it changes the nature of the deploy‐

ment. Suddenly, the coordinator’s logs become a crucial part of the durable sys‐

tem state—as important as the databases themselves, since the coordinator logs

are required in order to recover in-doubt transactions after a crash. Such applica‐

tion servers are no longer stateless.

• Since XA needs to be compatible with a wide range of data systems, it is necessar‐

ily a lowest common denominator. For example, it cannot detect deadlocks

across different systems (since that would require a standardized protocol for

systems to exchange information on the locks that each transaction is waiting

for), and it does not work with SSI (see “Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)” on

page 261), since that would require a protocol for identifying conflicts across dif‐

ferent systems.

• For database-internal distributed transactions (not XA), the limitations are not

so great—for example, a distributed version of SSI is possible. However, there

remains the problem that for 2PC to successfully commit a transaction, all par‐

ticipants must respond. Consequently, if any part of the system is broken, the

transaction also fails. Distributed transactions thus have a tendency of amplifying

failures, which runs counter to our goal of building fault-tolerant systems.

Do these facts mean we should give up all hope of keeping several systems consistent

with each other? Not quite—there are alternative methods that allow us to achieve

the same thing without the pain of heterogeneous distributed transactions. We will

return to these in Chapters 11 and 12. But first, we should wrap up the topic of consensus.

Fault-Tolerant Consensus

Informally, consensus means getting several nodes to agree on something. For exam‐

ple, if several people concurrently try to book the last seat on an airplane, or the same

seat in a theater, or try to register an account with the same username, then a consen‐

sus algorithm could be used to determine which one of these mutually incompatible

operations should be the winner.

The consensus problem is normally formalized as follows: one or more nodes may

propose values, and the consensus algorithm decides on one of those values. In the

seat-booking example, when several customers are concurrently trying to buy the last

seat, each node handling a customer request may propose the ID of the customer it is

serving, and the decision indicates which one of those customers got the seat.

364 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

In this formalism, a consensus algorithm must satisfy the following properties [25]:xiii Uniform agreement No two nodes decide differently.

Integrity

No node decides twice.

Validity

If a node decides value v, then v was proposed by some node.

Termination

Every node that does not crash eventually decides some value.

The uniform agreement and integrity properties define the core idea of consensus:

everyone decides on the same outcome, and once you have decided, you cannot

change your mind. The validity property exists mostly to rule out trivial solutions: for

example, you could have an algorithm that always decides null, no matter what was

proposed; this algorithm would satisfy the agreement and integrity properties, but

not the validity property.

If you don’t care about fault tolerance, then satisfying the first three properties is

easy: you can just hardcode one node to be the “dictator,” and let that node make all

of the decisions. However, if that one node fails, then the system can no longer make

any decisions. This is, in fact, what we saw in the case of two-phase commit: if the

coordinator fails, in-doubt participants cannot decide whether to commit or abort.

The termination property formalizes the idea of fault tolerance. It essentially says that

a consensus algorithm cannot simply sit around and do nothing forever—in other

words, it must make progress. Even if some nodes fail, the other nodes must still

reach a decision. (Termination is a liveness property, whereas the other three are

safety properties—see “Safety and liveness” on page 308.)

The system model of consensus assumes that when a node “crashes,” it suddenly dis‐

appears and never comes back. (Instead of a software crash, imagine that there is an

earthquake, and the datacenter containing your node is destroyed by a landslide. You

must assume that your node is buried under 30 feet of mud and is never going to

come back online.) In this system model, any algorithm that has to wait for a node to

recover is not going to be able to satisfy the termination property. In particular, 2PC

does not meet the requirements for termination.

xiii. This particular variant of consensus is called uniform consensus, which is equivalent to regular consensus

in asynchronous systems with unreliable failure detectors [71]. The academic literature usually refers to processes rather than nodes, but we use nodes here for consistency with the rest of this book.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 365

Of course, if all nodes crash and none of them are running, then it is not possible for any algorithm to decide anything. There is a limit to the number of failures that an algorithm can tolerate: in fact, it can be proved that any consensus algorithm requires

at least a majority of nodes to be functioning correctly in order to assure termination

[67]. That majority can safely form a quorum (see “Quorums for reading and writ‐

ing” on page 179).

Thus, the termination property is subject to the assumption that fewer than half of

the nodes are crashed or unreachable. However, most implementations of consensus

ensure that the safety properties—agreement, integrity, and validity—are always met,

even if a majority of nodes fail or there is a severe network problem [92]. Thus, a

large-scale outage can stop the system from being able to process requests, but it can‐

not corrupt the consensus system by causing it to make invalid decisions.

Most consensus algorithms assume that there are no Byzantine faults, as discussed in

“Byzantine Faults” on page 304. That is, if a node does not correctly follow the proto‐

col (for example, if it sends contradictory messages to different nodes), it may break

the safety properties of the protocol. It is possible to make consensus robust against

Byzantine faults as long as fewer than one-third of the nodes are Byzantine-faulty [25,

93], but we don’t have space to discuss those algorithms in detail in this book.

Consensus algorithms and total order broadcast

The best-known fault-tolerant consensus algorithms are Viewstamped Replication

(VSR) [94, 95], Paxos [96, 97, 98, 99], Raft [22, 100, 101], and Zab [15, 21, 102]. There are quite a few similarities between these algorithms, but they are not the same [103].

In this book we won’t go into full details of the different algorithms: it’s sufficient to

be aware of some of the high-level ideas that they have in common, unless you’re

implementing a consensus system yourself (which is probably not advisable—it’s

hard [98, 104]).

Most of these algorithms actually don’t directly use the formal model described here

(proposing and deciding on a single value, while satisfying the agreement, integrity,

validity, and termination properties). Instead, they decide on a sequence of values,

which makes them total order broadcast algorithms, as discussed previously in this

chapter (see “Total Order Broadcast” on page 348).

Remember that total order broadcast requires messages to be delivered exactly once,

in the same order, to all nodes. If you think about it, this is equivalent to performing

several rounds of consensus: in each round, nodes propose the message that they

want to send next, and then decide on the next message to be delivered in the total

order [67].

So, total order broadcast is equivalent to repeated rounds of consensus (each consen‐

sus decision corresponding to one message delivery):

366 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

• Due to the agreement property of consensus, all nodes decide to deliver the same

messages in the same order.

• Due to the integrity property, messages are not duplicated.

• Due to the validity property, messages are not corrupted and not fabricated out

of thin air.

• Due to the termination property, messages are not lost.

Viewstamped Replication, Raft, and Zab implement total order broadcast directly,

because that is more efficient than doing repeated rounds of one-value-at-a-time

consensus. In the case of Paxos, this optimization is known as Multi-Paxos.

Single-leader replication and consensus

In Chapter 5 we discussed single-leader replication (see “Leaders and Followers” on

page 152), which takes all the writes to the leader and applies them to the followers in

the same order, thus keeping replicas up to date. Isn’t this essentially total order

broadcast? How come we didn’t have to worry about consensus in Chapter 5?

The answer comes down to how the leader is chosen. If the leader is manually chosen

and configured by the humans in your operations team, you essentially have a “con‐

sensus algorithm” of the dictatorial variety: only one node is allowed to accept writes

(i.e., make decisions about the order of writes in the replication log), and if that node

goes down, the system becomes unavailable for writes until the operators manually

configure a different node to be the leader. Such a system can work well in practice,

but it does not satisfy the termination property of consensus because it requires

human intervention in order to make progress.

Some databases perform automatic leader election and failover, promoting a follower

to be the new leader if the old leader fails (see “Handling Node Outages” on page

156). This brings us closer to fault-tolerant total order broadcast, and thus to solving

consensus.

However, there is a problem. We previously discussed the problem of split brain, and

said that all nodes need to agree who the leader is—otherwise two different nodes

could each believe themselves to be the leader, and consequently get the database into

an inconsistent state. Thus, we need consensus in order to elect a leader. But if the

consensus algorithms described here are actually total order broadcast algorithms,

and total order broadcast is like single-leader replication, and single-leader replica‐

tion requires a leader, then…

It seems that in order to elect a leader, we first need a leader. In order to solve con‐

sensus, we must first solve consensus. How do we break out of this conundrum?

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 367

Epoch numbering and quorums

All of the consensus protocols discussed so far internally use a leader in some form or

another, but they don’t guarantee that the leader is unique. Instead, they can make a

weaker guarantee: the protocols define an epoch number (called the ballot number in

Paxos, view number in Viewstamped Replication, and term number in Raft) and

guarantee that within each epoch, the leader is unique.

Every time the current leader is thought to be dead, a vote is started among the nodes

to elect a new leader. This election is given an incremented epoch number, and thus

epoch numbers are totally ordered and monotonically increasing. If there is a conflict

between two different leaders in two different epochs (perhaps because the previous

leader actually wasn’t dead after all), then the leader with the higher epoch number

prevails.

Before a leader is allowed to decide anything, it must first check that there isn’t some

other leader with a higher epoch number which might take a conflicting decision.

How does a leader know that it hasn’t been ousted by another node? Recall “The

Truth Is Defined by the Majority” on page 300: a node cannot necessarily trust its

own judgment—just because a node thinks that it is the leader, that does not neces‐

sarily mean the other nodes accept it as their leader.

Instead, it must collect votes from a quorum of nodes (see “Quorums for reading and

writing” on page 179). For every decision that a leader wants to make, it must send

the proposed value to the other nodes and wait for a quorum of nodes to respond in

favor of the proposal. The quorum typically, but not always, consists of a majority of

nodes [105]. A node votes in favor of a proposal only if it is not aware of any other

leader with a higher epoch.

Thus, we have two rounds of voting: once to choose a leader, and a second time to

vote on a leader’s proposal. The key insight is that the quorums for those two votes

must overlap: if a vote on a proposal succeeds, at least one of the nodes that voted for

it must have also participated in the most recent leader election [105]. Thus, if the

vote on a proposal does not reveal any higher-numbered epoch, the current leader

can conclude that no leader election with a higher epoch number has happened, and

therefore be sure that it still holds the leadership. It can then safely decide the pro‐

posed value.

This voting process looks superficially similar to two-phase commit. The biggest dif‐

ferences are that in 2PC the coordinator is not elected, and that fault-tolerant consen‐

sus algorithms only require votes from a majority of nodes, whereas 2PC requires a

“yes” vote from every participant. Moreover, consensus algorithms define a recovery

process by which nodes can get into a consistent state after a new leader is elected,

ensuring that the safety properties are always met. These differences are key to the

correctness and fault tolerance of a consensus algorithm.

368 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Limitations of consensus

Consensus algorithms are a huge breakthrough for distributed systems: they bring

concrete safety properties (agreement, integrity, and validity) to systems where every‐

thing else is uncertain, and they nevertheless remain fault-tolerant (able to make pro‐

gress as long as a majority of nodes are working and reachable). They provide total

order broadcast, and therefore they can also implement linearizable atomic opera‐

tions in a fault-tolerant way (see “Implementing linearizable storage using total order

broadcast” on page 350).

Nevertheless, they are not used everywhere, because the benefits come at a cost.

The process by which nodes vote on proposals before they are decided is a kind of

synchronous replication. As discussed in “Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Repli‐

cation” on page 153, databases are often configured to use asynchronous replication.

In this configuration, some committed data can potentially be lost on failover—but

many people choose to accept this risk for the sake of better performance.

Consensus systems always require a strict majority to operate. This means you need a

minimum of three nodes in order to tolerate one failure (the remaining two out of

three form a majority), or a minimum of five nodes to tolerate two failures (the

remaining three out of five form a majority). If a network failure cuts off some nodes

from the rest, only the majority portion of the network can make progress, and the

rest is blocked (see also “The Cost of Linearizability” on page 335).

Most consensus algorithms assume a fixed set of nodes that participate in voting,

which means that you can’t just add or remove nodes in the cluster. Dynamic mem‐

bership extensions to consensus algorithms allow the set of nodes in the cluster to

change over time, but they are much less well understood than static membership

algorithms.

Consensus systems generally rely on timeouts to detect failed nodes. In environments

with highly variable network delays, especially geographically distributed systems, it

often happens that a node falsely believes the leader to have failed due to a transient

network issue. Although this error does not harm the safety properties, frequent

leader elections result in terrible performance because the system can end up spend‐

ing more time choosing a leader than doing any useful work.

Sometimes, consensus algorithms are particularly sensitive to network problems. For

example, Raft has been shown to have unpleasant edge cases [106]: if the entire net‐

work is working correctly except for one particular network link that is consistently

unreliable, Raft can get into situations where leadership continually bounces between

two nodes, or the current leader is continually forced to resign, so the system effec‐

tively never makes progress. Other consensus algorithms have similar problems, and

designing algorithms that are more robust to unreliable networks is still an open

research problem.

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 369

Membership and Coordination Services

Projects like ZooKeeper or etcd are often described as “distributed key-value stores”

or “coordination and configuration services.” The API of such a service looks pretty

much like that of a database: you can read and write the value for a given key, and

iterate over keys. So if they’re basically databases, why do they go to all the effort of

implementing a consensus algorithm? What makes them different from any other

kind of database?

To understand this, it is helpful to briefly explore how a service like ZooKeeper is

used. As an application developer, you will rarely need to use ZooKeeper directly,

because it is actually not well suited as a general-purpose database. It is more likely

that you will end up relying on it indirectly via some other project: for example,

HBase, Hadoop YARN, OpenStack Nova, and Kafka all rely on ZooKeeper running

in the background. What is it that these projects get from it?

ZooKeeper and etcd are designed to hold small amounts of data that can fit entirely

in memory (although they still write to disk for durability)—so you wouldn’t want to

store all of your application’s data here. That small amount of data is replicated

across all the nodes using a fault-tolerant total order broadcast algorithm. As dis‐

cussed previously, total order broadcast is just what you need for database replica‐

tion: if each message represents a write to the database, applying the same writes in

the same order keeps replicas consistent with each other.

ZooKeeper is modeled after Google’s Chubby lock service [14, 98], implementing not

only total order broadcast (and hence consensus), but also an interesting set of other

features that turn out to be particularly useful when building distributed systems:

Linearizable atomic operations

Using an atomic compare-and-set operation, you can implement a lock: if several

nodes concurrently try to perform the same operation, only one of them will suc‐

ceed. The consensus protocol guarantees that the operation will be atomic and

linearizable, even if a node fails or the network is interrupted at any point. A dis‐

tributed lock is usually implemented as a lease, which has an expiry time so that

it is eventually released in case the client fails (see “Process Pauses” on page 295).

Total ordering of operations

As discussed in “The leader and the lock” on page 301, when some resource is

protected by a lock or lease, you need a fencing token to prevent clients from con‐

flicting with each other in the case of a process pause. The fencing token is some

number that monotonically increases every time the lock is acquired. ZooKeeper

provides this by totally ordering all operations and giving each operation a

monotonically increasing transaction ID (zxid) and version number (cversion)

[15].

370 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

Failure detection

Clients maintain a long-lived session on ZooKeeper servers, and the client and

server periodically exchange heartbeats to check that the other node is still alive.

Even if the connection is temporarily interrupted, or a ZooKeeper node fails, the

session remains active. However, if the heartbeats cease for a duration that is

longer than the session timeout, ZooKeeper declares the session to be dead. Any

locks held by a session can be configured to be automatically released when the

session times out (ZooKeeper calls these ephemeral nodes).

Change notifications

Not only can one client read locks and values that were created by another client,

but it can also watch them for changes. Thus, a client can find out when another

client joins the cluster (based on the value it writes to ZooKeeper), or if another

client fails (because its session times out and its ephemeral nodes disappear). By

subscribing to notifications, a client avoids having to frequently poll to find out

about changes.

Of these features, only the linearizable atomic operations really require consensus.

However, it is the combination of these features that makes systems like ZooKeeper

so useful for distributed coordination.

Allocating work to nodes

One example in which the ZooKeeper/Chubby model works well is if you have sev‐

eral instances of a process or service, and one of them needs to be chosen as leader or

primary. If the leader fails, one of the other nodes should take over. This is of course

useful for single-leader databases, but it’s also useful for job schedulers and similar

stateful systems.

Another example arises when you have some partitioned resource (database, message

streams, file storage, distributed actor system, etc.) and need to decide which parti‐

tion to assign to which node. As new nodes join the cluster, some of the partitions

need to be moved from existing nodes to the new nodes in order to rebalance the

load (see “Rebalancing Partitions” on page 209). As nodes are removed or fail, other

nodes need to take over the failed nodes’ work.

These kinds of tasks can be achieved by judicious use of atomic operations, ephem‐

eral nodes, and notifications in ZooKeeper. If done correctly, this approach allows

the application to automatically recover from faults without human intervention. It’s

not easy, despite the appearance of libraries such as Apache Curator [17] that have

sprung up to provide higher-level tools on top of the ZooKeeper client API—but it is

still much better than attempting to implement the necessary consensus algorithms

from scratch, which has a poor success record [107].

Distributed Transactions and Consensus | 371

An application may initially run only on a single node, but eventually may grow to

thousands of nodes. Trying to perform majority votes over so many nodes would be

terribly inefficient. Instead, ZooKeeper runs on a fixed number of nodes (usually

three or five) and performs its majority votes among those nodes while supporting a

potentially large number of clients. Thus, ZooKeeper provides a way of “outsourcing”

some of the work of coordinating nodes (consensus, operation ordering, and failure

detection) to an external service.

Normally, the kind of data managed by ZooKeeper is quite slow-changing: it repre‐

sents information like “the node running on 10.1.1.23 is the leader for partition 7,”

which may change on a timescale of minutes or hours. It is not intended for storing

the runtime state of the application, which may change thousands or even millions of

times per second. If application state needs to be replicated from one node to

another, other tools (such as Apache BookKeeper [108]) can be used.

Service discovery

ZooKeeper, etcd, and Consul are also often used for service discovery—that is, to find

out which IP address you need to connect to in order to reach a particular service. In

cloud datacenter environments, where it is common for virtual machines to continu‐

ally come and go, you often don’t know the IP addresses of your services ahead of

time. Instead, you can configure your services such that when they start up they reg‐

ister their network endpoints in a service registry, where they can then be found by

other services.

However, it is less clear whether service discovery actually requires consensus. DNS is

the traditional way of looking up the IP address for a service name, and it uses multi‐

ple layers of caching to achieve good performance and availability. Reads from DNS

are absolutely not linearizable, and it is usually not considered problematic if the

results from a DNS query are a little stale [109]. It is more important that DNS is reliably available and robust to network interruptions.

Although service discovery does not require consensus, leader election does. Thus, if

your consensus system already knows who the leader is, then it can make sense to

also use that information to help other services discover who the leader is. For this

purpose, some consensus systems support read-only caching replicas. These replicas

asynchronously receive the log of all decisions of the consensus algorithm, but do not

actively participate in voting. They are therefore able to serve read requests that do

not need to be linearizable.

Membership services

ZooKeeper and friends can be seen as part of a long history of research into member‐

ship services, which goes back to the 1980s and has been important for building

highly reliable systems, e.g., for air traffic control [110].

372 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

A membership service determines which nodes are currently active and live members

of a cluster. As we saw throughout Chapter 8, due to unbounded network delays it’s

not possible to reliably detect whether another node has failed. However, if you cou‐

ple failure detection with consensus, nodes can come to an agreement about which

nodes should be considered alive or not.

It could still happen that a node is incorrectly declared dead by consensus, even

though it is actually alive. But it is nevertheless very useful for a system to have agree‐

ment on which nodes constitute the current membership. For example, choosing a

leader could mean simply choosing the lowest-numbered among the current mem‐

bers, but this approach would not work if different nodes have divergent opinions on

who the current members are.

Summary

In this chapter we examined the topics of consistency and consensus from several dif‐

ferent angles. We looked in depth at linearizability, a popular consistency model: its

goal is to make replicated data appear as though there were only a single copy, and to

make all operations act on it atomically. Although linearizability is appealing because

it is easy to understand—it makes a database behave like a variable in a single-

threaded program—it has the downside of being slow, especially in environments

with large network delays.

We also explored causality, which imposes an ordering on events in a system (what

happened before what, based on cause and effect). Unlike linearizability, which puts

all operations in a single, totally ordered timeline, causality provides us with a weaker

consistency model: some things can be concurrent, so the version history is like a

timeline with branching and merging. Causal consistency does not have the coordi‐

nation overhead of linearizability and is much less sensitive to network problems.

However, even if we capture the causal ordering (for example using Lamport time‐

stamps), we saw that some things cannot be implemented this way: in “Timestamp

ordering is not sufficient” on page 347 we considered the example of ensuring that a

username is unique and rejecting concurrent registrations for the same username. If

one node is going to accept a registration, it needs to somehow know that another

node isn’t concurrently in the process of registering the same name. This problem led

us toward consensus.

We saw that achieving consensus means deciding something in such a way that all

nodes agree on what was decided, and such that the decision is irrevocable. With

some digging, it turns out that a wide range of problems are actually reducible to

consensus and are equivalent to each other (in the sense that if you have a solution

for one of them, you can easily transform it into a solution for one of the others).

Such equivalent problems include:

Summary | 373

Linearizable compare-and-set registers

The register needs to atomically decide whether to set its value, based on whether

its current value equals the parameter given in the operation.

Atomic transaction commit

A database must decide whether to commit or abort a distributed transaction.

Total order broadcast

The messaging system must decide on the order in which to deliver messages.

Locks and leases

When several clients are racing to grab a lock or lease, the lock decides which one

successfully acquired it.

Membership/coordination service

Given a failure detector (e.g., timeouts), the system must decide which nodes are

alive, and which should be considered dead because their sessions timed out.

Uniqueness constraint

When several transactions concurrently try to create conflicting records with the

same key, the constraint must decide which one to allow and which should fail

with a constraint violation.

All of these are straightforward if you only have a single node, or if you are willing to

assign the decision-making capability to a single node. This is what happens in a

single-leader database: all the power to make decisions is vested in the leader, which

is why such databases are able to provide linearizable operations, uniqueness con‐

straints, a totally ordered replication log, and more.

However, if that single leader fails, or if a network interruption makes the leader

unreachable, such a system becomes unable to make any progress. There are three

ways of handling that situation:

1. Wait for the leader to recover, and accept that the system will be blocked in the

meantime. Many XA/JTA transaction coordinators choose this option. This

approach does not fully solve consensus because it does not satisfy the termina‐

tion property: if the leader does not recover, the system can be blocked forever.

2. Manually fail over by getting humans to choose a new leader node and reconfig‐

ure the system to use it. Many relational databases take this approach. It is a kind

of consensus by “act of God”—the human operator, outside of the computer sys‐

tem, makes the decision. The speed of failover is limited by the speed at which

humans can act, which is generally slower than computers.

374 | Chapter 9: Consistency and Consensus

3. Use an algorithm to automatically choose a new leader. This approach requires a

consensus algorithm, and it is advisable to use a proven algorithm that correctly

handles adverse network conditions [107].

Although a single-leader database can provide linearizability without executing a

consensus algorithm on every write, it still requires consensus to maintain its leader‐

ship and for leadership changes. Thus, in some sense, having a leader only “kicks the

can down the road”: consensus is still required, only in a different place, and less fre‐

quently. The good news is that fault-tolerant algorithms and systems for consensus

exist, and we briefly discussed them in this chapter.

Tools like ZooKeeper play an important role in providing an “outsourced” consen‐

sus, failure detection, and membership service that applications can use. It’s not easy

to use, but it is much better than trying to develop your own algorithms that can

withstand all the problems discussed in Chapter 8. If you find yourself wanting to do

one of those things that is reducible to consensus, and you want it to be fault-tolerant,

then it is advisable to use something like ZooKeeper.

Nevertheless, not every system necessarily requires consensus: for example, leaderless

and multi-leader replication systems typically do not use global consensus. The con‐

flicts that occur in these systems (see “Handling Write Conflicts” on page 171) are a

consequence of not having consensus across different leaders, but maybe that’s okay:

maybe we simply need to cope without linearizability and learn to work better with

data that has branching and merging version histories.

This chapter referenced a large body of research on the theory of distributed systems.

Although the theoretical papers and proofs are not always easy to understand, and

sometimes make unrealistic assumptions, they are incredibly valuable for informing

practical work in this field: they help us reason about what can and cannot be done,

and help us find the counterintuitive ways in which distributed systems are often

flawed. If you have the time, the references are well worth exploring.

This brings us to the end of Part II of this book, in which we covered replication

(Chapter 5), partitioning (Chapter 6), transactions (Chapter 7), distributed system failure models (Chapter 8), and finally consistency and consensus (Chapter 9). Now

that we have laid a firm foundation of theory, in Part III we will turn once again to

more practical systems, and discuss how to build powerful applications from hetero‐

geneous building blocks.

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91–120, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-642-11293-5, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-11294-2_6

Summary | 383

PART III

Derived Data

In Parts I and II of this book, we assembled from the ground up all the major considerations that go into a distributed database, from the layout of data on disk all the way to the limits of distributed consistency in the presence of faults. However, this

discussion assumed that there was only one database in the application.

In reality, data systems are often more complex. In a large application you often need

to be able to access and process data in many different ways, and there is no one data‐

base that can satisfy all those different needs simultaneously. Applications thus com‐

monly use a combination of several different datastores, indexes, caches, analytics

systems, etc. and implement mechanisms for moving data from one store to another.

In this final part of the book, we will examine the issues around integrating multiple

different data systems, potentially with different data models and optimized for dif‐

ferent access patterns, into one coherent application architecture. This aspect of

system-building is often overlooked by vendors who claim that their product can sat‐

isfy all your needs. In reality, integrating disparate systems is one of the most impor‐

tant things that needs to be done in a nontrivial application.

Systems of Record and Derived Data

On a high level, systems that store and process data can be grouped into two broad

categories:

Systems of record

A system of record, also known as source of truth, holds the authoritative version

of your data. When new data comes in, e.g., as user input, it is first written here.

Each fact is represented exactly once (the representation is typically normalized).

If there is any discrepancy between another system and the system of record,

then the value in the system of record is (by definition) the correct one.

Derived data systems

Data in a derived system is the result of taking some existing data from another

system and transforming or processing it in some way. If you lose derived data,

you can recreate it from the original source. A classic example is a cache: data can

be served from the cache if present, but if the cache doesn’t contain what you

need, you can fall back to the underlying database. Denormalized values, indexes,

and materialized views also fall into this category. In recommendation systems,

predictive summary data is often derived from usage logs.

Technically speaking, derived data is redundant, in the sense that it duplicates exist‐

ing information. However, it is often essential for getting good performance on read

queries. It is commonly denormalized. You can derive several different datasets from

a single source, enabling you to look at the data from different “points of view.”

Not all systems make a clear distinction between systems of record and derived data

in their architecture, but it’s a very helpful distinction to make, because it clarifies the

dataflow through your system: it makes explicit which parts of the system have which

inputs and which outputs, and how they depend on each other.

Most databases, storage engines, and query languages are not inherently either a sys‐

tem of record or a derived system. A database is just a tool: how you use it is up to

you. The distinction between system of record and derived data system depends not

on the tool, but on how you use it in your application.

By being clear about which data is derived from which other data, you can bring

clarity to an otherwise confusing system architecture. This point will be a running

theme throughout this part of the book.

Overview of Chapters

We will start in Chapter 10 by examining batch-oriented dataflow systems such as

MapReduce, and see how they give us good tools and principles for building large-

scale data systems. In Chapter 11 we will take those ideas and apply them to data

streams, which allow us to do the same kinds of things with lower delays. Chapter 12

concludes the book by exploring ideas about how we might use these tools to build

reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications in the future.

CHAPTER 10

Batch Processing

A system cannot be successful if it is too strongly influenced by a single person. Once the

initial design is complete and fairly robust, the real test begins as people with many different

viewpoints undertake their own experiments.

—Donald Knuth

In the first two parts of this book we talked a lot about requests and queries, and the

corresponding responses or results. This style of data processing is assumed in many

modern data systems: you ask for something, or you send an instruction, and some

time later the system (hopefully) gives you an answer. Databases, caches, search

indexes, web servers, and many other systems work this way.

In such online systems, whether it’s a web browser requesting a page or a service call‐

ing a remote API, we generally assume that the request is triggered by a human user,

and that the user is waiting for the response. They shouldn’t have to wait too long, so

we pay a lot of attention to the response time of these systems (see “Describing Perfor‐

mance” on page 13).

The web, and increasing numbers of HTTP/REST-based APIs, has made the request/

response style of interaction so common that it’s easy to take it for granted. But we

should remember that it’s not the only way of building systems, and that other

approaches have their merits too. Let’s distinguish three different types of systems:

Services (online systems)

A service waits for a request or instruction from a client to arrive. When one is

received, the service tries to handle it as quickly as possible and sends a response

back. Response time is usually the primary measure of performance of a service,

and availability is often very important (if the client can’t reach the service, the

user will probably get an error message).

389

Batch processing systems (offline systems)

A batch processing system takes a large amount of input data, runs a job to pro‐

cess it, and produces some output data. Jobs often take a while (from a few

minutes to several days), so there normally isn’t a user waiting for the job to fin‐

ish. Instead, batch jobs are often scheduled to run periodically (for example, once

a day). The primary performance measure of a batch job is usually throughput

(the time it takes to crunch through an input dataset of a certain size). We dis‐

cuss batch processing in this chapter.

Stream processing systems (near-real-time systems)

Stream processing is somewhere between online and offline/batch processing (so

it is sometimes called near-real-time or nearline processing). Like a batch pro‐

cessing system, a stream processor consumes inputs and produces outputs

(rather than responding to requests). However, a stream job operates on events

shortly after they happen, whereas a batch job operates on a fixed set of input

data. This difference allows stream processing systems to have lower latency than

the equivalent batch systems. As stream processing builds upon batch process‐

ing, we discuss it in Chapter 11.

As we shall see in this chapter, batch processing is an important building block in our

quest to build reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications. For example, Map‐

Reduce, a batch processing algorithm published in 2004 [1], was (perhaps over-

enthusiastically) called “the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable” [2]. It was subsequently implemented in various open source data systems, including Hadoop, CouchDB, and MongoDB.

MapReduce is a fairly low-level programming model compared to the parallel pro‐

cessing systems that were developed for data warehouses many years previously [3,

4], but it was a major step forward in terms of the scale of processing that could be

achieved on commodity hardware. Although the importance of MapReduce is now

declining [5], it is still worth understanding, because it provides a clear picture of

why and how batch processing is useful.

In fact, batch processing is a very old form of computing. Long before programmable

digital computers were invented, punch card tabulating machines—such as the Hol‐

lerith machines used in the 1890 US Census [6]—implemented a semi-mechanized

form of batch processing to compute aggregate statistics from large inputs. And Map‐

Reduce bears an uncanny resemblance to the electromechanical IBM card-sorting

machines that were widely used for business data processing in the 1940s and 1950s

[7]. As usual, history has a tendency of repeating itself.

In this chapter, we will look at MapReduce and several other batch processing algo‐

rithms and frameworks, and explore how they are used in modern data systems. But

first, to get started, we will look at data processing using standard Unix tools. Even if

you are already familiar with them, a reminder about the Unix philosophy is worth‐

390 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

while because the ideas and lessons from Unix carry over to large-scale, heterogene‐

ous distributed data systems.

Batch Processing with Unix Tools

Let’s start with a simple example. Say you have a web server that appends a line to a

log file every time it serves a request. For example, using the nginx default access log

format, one line of the log might look like this:

216.58.210.78 - - [27/Feb/2015:17:55:11 +0000] "GET /css/typography.css HTTP/1.1"

200 3377 "http://martin.kleppmann.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X

10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115

Safari/537.36"

(That is actually one line; it’s only broken onto multiple lines here for readability.)

There’s a lot of information in that line. In order to interpret it, you need to look at

the definition of the log format, which is as follows:

$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request"

$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent"

So, this one line of the log indicates that on February 27, 2015, at 17:55:11 UTC, the

server received a request for the file /css/typography.css from the client IP address

216.58.210.78. The user was not authenticated, so $remote_user is set to a hyphen

(-). The response status was 200 (i.e., the request was successful), and the response

was 3,377 bytes in size. The web browser was Chrome 40, and it loaded the file

because it was referenced in the page at the URL http://martin.kleppmann.com/.

Simple Log Analysis

Various tools can take these log files and produce pretty reports about your website

traffic, but for the sake of exercise, let’s build our own, using basic Unix tools. For

example, say you want to find the five most popular pages on your website. You can

do this in a Unix shell as follows:i

cat /var/log/nginx/access.log |

awk '{print $7}' |

sort |

uniq -c |

sort -r -n |

head -n 5

Read the log file.

i. Some people love to point out that cat is unnecessary here, as the input file could be given directly as an argument to awk. However, the linear pipeline is more apparent when written like this.

Batch Processing with Unix Tools | 391

Split each line into fields by whitespace, and output only the seventh such field

from each line, which happens to be the requested URL. In our example line, this

request URL is /css/typography.css.

Alphabetically sort the list of requested URLs. If some URL has been requested

n times, then after sorting, the file contains the same URL repeated n times in a

row.

The uniq command filters out repeated lines in its input by checking whether

two adjacent lines are the same. The -c option tells it to also output a counter: for

every distinct URL, it reports how many times that URL appeared in the input.

The second sort sorts by the number (-n) at the start of each line, which is the

number of times the URL was requested. It then returns the results in reverse

(-r) order, i.e. with the largest number first.

Finally, head outputs just the first five lines (-n 5) of input, and discards the rest.

The output of that series of commands looks something like this:

4189 /favicon.ico

3631 /2013/05/24/improving-security-of-ssh-private-keys.html

2124 /2012/12/05/schema-evolution-in-avro-protocol-buffers-thrift.html

1369 /

915 /css/typography.css

Although the preceding command line likely looks a bit obscure if you’re unfamiliar

with Unix tools, it is incredibly powerful. It will process gigabytes of log files in a

matter of seconds, and you can easily modify the analysis to suit your needs. For

example, if you want to omit CSS files from the report, change the awk argument to

'$7 !~ /\.css$/ {print $7}'. If you want to count top client IP addresses instead

of top pages, change the awk argument to '{print $1}'. And so on.

We don’t have space in this book to explore Unix tools in detail, but they are very

much worth learning about. Surprisingly many data analyses can be done in a few

minutes using some combination of awk, sed, grep, sort, uniq, and xargs, and they

perform surprisingly well [8].

Chain of commands versus custom program

Instead of the chain of Unix commands, you could write a simple program to do the

same thing. For example, in Ruby, it might look something like this:

392 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

counts = Hash.new(0)

File.open('/var/log/nginx/access.log') do |file|

file.each do |line|

url = line.split[6]

counts[url] += 1

end

end

top5 = counts.map{|url, count| [count, url] }.sort.reverse[0...5]

top5.each{|count, url| puts "#{count} #{url}" }

counts is a hash table that keeps a counter for the number of times we’ve seen

each URL. A counter is zero by default.

From each line of the log, we take the URL to be the seventh whitespace-

separated field (the array index here is 6 because Ruby’s arrays are zero-indexed).

Increment the counter for the URL in the current line of the log.

Sort the hash table contents by counter value (descending), and take the top five

entries.

Print out those top five entries.

This program is not as concise as the chain of Unix pipes, but it’s fairly readable, and

which of the two you prefer is partly a matter of taste. However, besides the superfi‐

cial syntactic differences between the two, there is a big difference in the execution

flow, which becomes apparent if you run this analysis on a large file.

Sorting versus in-memory aggregation

The Ruby script keeps an in-memory hash table of URLs, where each URL is mapped

to the number of times it has been seen. The Unix pipeline example does not have

such a hash table, but instead relies on sorting a list of URLs in which multiple occur‐

rences of the same URL are simply repeated.

Which approach is better? It depends how many different URLs you have. For most

small to mid-sized websites, you can probably fit all distinct URLs, and a counter for

each URL, in (say) 1 GB of memory. In this example, the working set of the job (the

amount of memory to which the job needs random access) depends only on the

number of distinct URLs: if there are a million log entries for a single URL, the space

required in the hash table is still just one URL plus the size of the counter. If this

working set is small enough, an in-memory hash table works fine—even on a laptop.

On the other hand, if the job’s working set is larger than the available memory, the

sorting approach has the advantage that it can make efficient use of disks. It’s the

Batch Processing with Unix Tools | 393

same principle as we discussed in “SSTables and LSM-Trees” on page 76: chunks of data can be sorted in memory and written out to disk as segment files, and then multiple sorted segments can be merged into a larger sorted file. Mergesort has sequential access patterns that perform well on disks. (Remember that optimizing for sequential

I/O was a recurring theme in Chapter 3. The same pattern reappears here.)

The sort utility in GNU Coreutils (Linux) automatically handles larger-than-

memory datasets by spilling to disk, and automatically parallelizes sorting across

multiple CPU cores [9]. This means that the simple chain of Unix commands we saw

earlier easily scales to large datasets, without running out of memory. The bottleneck

is likely to be the rate at which the input file can be read from disk.

The Unix Philosophy

It’s no coincidence that we were able to analyze a log file quite easily, using a chain of

commands like in the previous example: this was in fact one of the key design ideas of

Unix, and it remains astonishingly relevant today. Let’s look at it in some more depth

so that we can borrow some ideas from Unix [10].

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes, first described them like this in 1964 [11]:

“We should have some ways of connecting programs like [a] garden hose—screw in

another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way. This is

the way of I/O also.” The plumbing analogy stuck, and the idea of connecting pro‐

grams with pipes became part of what is now known as the Unix philosophy—a set of

design principles that became popular among the developers and users of Unix. The

philosophy was described in 1978 as follows [12, 13]:

1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than

complicate old programs by adding new “features”.

2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet

unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid

stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within

weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if

you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after

you’ve finished using them.

This approach—automation, rapid prototyping, incremental iteration, being friendly

to experimentation, and breaking down large projects into manageable chunks—

sounds remarkably like the Agile and DevOps movements of today. Surprisingly little

has changed in four decades.

394 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

The sort tool is a great example of a program that does one thing well. It is arguably

a better sorting implementation than most programming languages have in their

standard libraries (which do not spill to disk and do not use multiple threads, even

when that would be beneficial). And yet, sort is barely useful in isolation. It only

becomes powerful in combination with the other Unix tools, such as uniq.

A Unix shell like bash lets us easily compose these small programs into surprisingly

powerful data processing jobs. Even though many of these programs are written by

different groups of people, they can be joined together in flexible ways. What does

Unix do to enable this composability?

A uniform interface

If you expect the output of one program to become the input to another program,

that means those programs must use the same data format—in other words, a com‐

patible interface. If you want to be able to connect any program’s output to any pro‐

gram’s input, that means that all programs must use the same input/output interface.

In Unix, that interface is a file (or, more precisely, a file descriptor). A file is just an

ordered sequence of bytes. Because that is such a simple interface, many different

things can be represented using the same interface: an actual file on the filesystem, a

communication channel to another process (Unix socket, stdin, stdout), a device

driver (say /dev/audio or /dev/lp0), a socket representing a TCP connection, and so

on. It’s easy to take this for granted, but it’s actually quite remarkable that these very

different things can share a uniform interface, so they can easily be plugged together.ii

By convention, many (but not all) Unix programs treat this sequence of bytes as

ASCII text. Our log analysis example used this fact: awk, sort, uniq, and head all treat

their input file as a list of records separated by the \n (newline, ASCII 0x0A) charac‐

ter. The choice of \n is arbitrary—arguably, the ASCII record separator 0x1E would

have been a better choice, since it’s intended for this purpose [14]—but in any case,

the fact that all these programs have standardized on using the same record separator

allows them to interoperate.

ii. Another example of a uniform interface is URLs and HTTP, the foundations of the web. A URL identifies

a particular thing (resource) on a website, and you can link to any URL from any other website. A user with a web browser can thus seamlessly jump between websites by following links, even though the servers may be operated by entirely unrelated organizations. This principle seems obvious today, but it was a key insight in making the web the success that it is today. Prior systems were not so uniform: for example, in the era of bulletin board systems (BBSs), each system had its own phone number and baud rate configuration. A refer‐

ence from one BBS to another would have to be in the form of a phone number and modem settings; the user

would have to hang up, dial the other BBS, and then manually find the information they were looking for. It wasn’t possible to link directly to some piece of content inside another BBS.

Batch Processing with Unix Tools | 395

The parsing of each record (i.e., a line of input) is more vague. Unix tools commonly

split a line into fields by whitespace or tab characters, but CSV (comma-separated),

pipe-separated, and other encodings are also used. Even a fairly simple tool like

xargs has half a dozen command-line options for specifying how its input should be

parsed.

The uniform interface of ASCII text mostly works, but it’s not exactly beautiful: our

log analysis example used {print $7} to extract the URL, which is not very readable.

In an ideal world this could have perhaps been {print $request_url} or something

of that sort. We will return to this idea later.

Although it’s not perfect, even decades later, the uniform interface of Unix is still

something remarkable. Not many pieces of software interoperate and compose as

well as Unix tools do: you can’t easily pipe the contents of your email account and

your online shopping history through a custom analysis tool into a spreadsheet and

post the results to a social network or a wiki. Today it’s an exception, not the norm,

to have programs that work together as smoothly as Unix tools do.

Even databases with the same data model often don’t make it easy to get data out of

one and into the other. This lack of integration leads to Balkanization of data.

Separation of logic and wiring

Another characteristic feature of Unix tools is their use of standard input (stdin) and

standard output (stdout). If you run a program and don’t specify anything else,

stdin comes from the keyboard and stdout goes to the screen. However, you can

also take input from a file and/or redirect output to a file. Pipes let you attach the

stdout of one process to the stdin of another process (with a small in-memory

buffer, and without writing the entire intermediate data stream to disk).

A program can still read and write files directly if it needs to, but the Unix approach

works best if a program doesn’t worry about particular file paths and simply uses

stdin and stdout. This allows a shell user to wire up the input and output in what‐

ever way they want; the program doesn’t know or care where the input is coming

from and where the output is going to. (One could say this is a form of loose coupling,

late binding [15], or inversion of control [16].) Separating the input/output wiring

from the program logic makes it easier to compose small tools into bigger systems.

You can even write your own programs and combine them with the tools provided

by the operating system. Your program just needs to read input from stdin and write

output to stdout, and it can participate in data processing pipelines. In the log analy‐

sis example, you could write a tool that translates user-agent strings into more sensi‐

ble browser identifiers, or a tool that translates IP addresses into country codes, and

simply plug it into the pipeline. The sort program doesn’t care whether it’s commu‐

nicating with another part of the operating system or with a program written by you.

396 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

However, there are limits to what you can do with stdin and stdout. Programs that

need multiple inputs or outputs are possible but tricky. You can’t pipe a program’s

output into a network connection [17, 18]. iii If a program directly opens files for reading and writing, or starts another program as a subprocess, or opens a network connection, then that I/O is wired up by the program itself. It can still be configurable (through command-line options, for example), but the flexibility of wiring up inputs

and outputs in a shell is reduced.

Transparency and experimentation

Part of what makes Unix tools so successful is that they make it quite easy to see what

is going on:

• The input files to Unix commands are normally treated as immutable. This

means you can run the commands as often as you want, trying various

command-line options, without damaging the input files.

• You can end the pipeline at any point, pipe the output into less, and look at it to

see if it has the expected form. This ability to inspect is great for debugging.

• You can write the output of one pipeline stage to a file and use that file as input

to the next stage. This allows you to restart the later stage without rerunning the

entire pipeline.

Thus, even though Unix tools are quite blunt, simple tools compared to a query opti‐

mizer of a relational database, they remain amazingly useful, especially for experi‐

mentation.

However, the biggest limitation of Unix tools is that they run only on a single

machine—and that’s where tools like Hadoop come in.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems

MapReduce is a bit like Unix tools, but distributed across potentially thousands of

machines. Like Unix tools, it is a fairly blunt, brute-force, but surprisingly effective

tool. A single MapReduce job is comparable to a single Unix process: it takes one or

more inputs and produces one or more outputs.

As with most Unix tools, running a MapReduce job normally does not modify the

input and does not have any side effects other than producing the output. The output

iii. Except by using a separate tool, such as netcat or curl. Unix started out trying to represent everything as

files, but the BSD sockets API deviated from that convention [17]. The research operating systems Plan 9 and Inferno are more consistent in their use of files: they represent a TCP connection as a file in /net/tcp [18].

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 397

files are written once, in a sequential fashion (not modifying any existing part of a file once it has been written).

While Unix tools use stdin and stdout as input and output, MapReduce jobs read

and write files on a distributed filesystem. In Hadoop’s implementation of Map‐

Reduce, that filesystem is called HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), an open

source reimplementation of the Google File System (GFS) [19].

Various other distributed filesystems besides HDFS exist, such as GlusterFS and the

Quantcast File System (QFS) [20]. Object storage services such as Amazon S3, Azure

Blob Storage, and OpenStack Swift [21] are similar in many ways. iv In this chapter we

will mostly use HDFS as a running example, but the principles apply to any dis‐

tributed filesystem.

HDFS is based on the shared-nothing principle (see the introduction to Part II), in

contrast to the shared-disk approach of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage

Area Network (SAN) architectures. Shared-disk storage is implemented by a central‐

ized storage appliance, often using custom hardware and special network infrastruc‐

ture such as Fibre Channel. On the other hand, the shared-nothing approach requires

no special hardware, only computers connected by a conventional datacenter net‐

work.

HDFS consists of a daemon process running on each machine, exposing a network

service that allows other nodes to access files stored on that machine (assuming that

every general-purpose machine in a datacenter has some disks attached to it). A cen‐

tral server called the NameNode keeps track of which file blocks are stored on which

machine. Thus, HDFS conceptually creates one big filesystem that can use the space

on the disks of all machines running the daemon.

In order to tolerate machine and disk failures, file blocks are replicated on multiple

machines. Replication may mean simply several copies of the same data on multiple

machines, as in Chapter 5, or an erasure coding scheme such as Reed–Solomon codes, which allows lost data to be recovered with lower storage overhead than full replication [20, 22]. The techniques are similar to RAID, which provides redundancy across

several disks attached to the same machine; the difference is that in a distributed file‐

system, file access and replication are done over a conventional datacenter network

without special hardware.

iv. One difference is that with HDFS, computing tasks can be scheduled to run on the machine that stores a

copy of a particular file, whereas object stores usually keep storage and computation separate. Reading from a local disk has a performance advantage if network bandwidth is a bottleneck. Note however that if erasure coding is used, the locality advantage is lost, because the data from several machines must be combined in

order to reconstitute the original file [20].

398 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

HDFS has scaled well: at the time of writing, the biggest HDFS deployments run on

tens of thousands of machines, with combined storage capacity of hundreds of peta‐

bytes [23]. Such large scale has become viable because the cost of data storage and

access on HDFS, using commodity hardware and open source software, is much

lower than that of the equivalent capacity on a dedicated storage appliance [24].

MapReduce Job Execution

MapReduce is a programming framework with which you can write code to process

large datasets in a distributed filesystem like HDFS. The easiest way of understanding

it is by referring back to the web server log analysis example in “Simple Log Analysis”

on page 391. The pattern of data processing in MapReduce is very similar to this

example:

1. Read a set of input files, and break it up into records. In the web server log exam‐

ple, each record is one line in the log (that is, \n is the record separator).

2. Call the mapper function to extract a key and value from each input record. In

the preceding example, the mapper function is awk '{print $7}': it extracts the

URL ($7) as the key, and leaves the value empty.

3. Sort all of the key-value pairs by key. In the log example, this is done by the first

sort command.

4. Call the reducer function to iterate over the sorted key-value pairs. If there are

multiple occurrences of the same key, the sorting has made them adjacent in the

list, so it is easy to combine those values without having to keep a lot of state in

memory. In the preceding example, the reducer is implemented by the command

uniq -c, which counts the number of adjacent records with the same key.

Those four steps can be performed by one MapReduce job. Steps 2 (map) and 4

(reduce) are where you write your custom data processing code. Step 1 (breaking files

into records) is handled by the input format parser. Step 3, the sort step, is implicit

in MapReduce—you don’t have to write it, because the output from the mapper is

always sorted before it is given to the reducer.

To create a MapReduce job, you need to implement two callback functions, the map‐

per and reducer, which behave as follows (see also “MapReduce Querying” on page

46):

Mapper

The mapper is called once for every input record, and its job is to extract the key

and value from the input record. For each input, it may generate any number of

key-value pairs (including none). It does not keep any state from one input

record to the next, so each record is handled independently.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 399

Reducer

The MapReduce framework takes the key-value pairs produced by the mappers,

collects all the values belonging to the same key, and calls the reducer with an

iterator over that collection of values. The reducer can produce output records

(such as the number of occurrences of the same URL).

In the web server log example, we had a second sort command in step 5, which

ranked URLs by number of requests. In MapReduce, if you need a second sorting

stage, you can implement it by writing a second MapReduce job and using the output

of the first job as input to the second job. Viewed like this, the role of the mapper is to

prepare the data by putting it into a form that is suitable for sorting, and the role of

the reducer is to process the data that has been sorted.

Distributed execution of MapReduce

The main difference from pipelines of Unix commands is that MapReduce can paral‐

lelize a computation across many machines, without you having to write code to

explicitly handle the parallelism. The mapper and reducer only operate on one record

at a time; they don’t need to know where their input is coming from or their output is

going to, so the framework can handle the complexities of moving data between

machines.

It is possible to use standard Unix tools as mappers and reducers in a distributed

computation [25], but more commonly they are implemented as functions in a con‐

ventional programming language. In Hadoop MapReduce, the mapper and reducer

are each a Java class that implements a particular interface. In MongoDB and

CouchDB, mappers and reducers are JavaScript functions (see “MapReduce Query‐

ing” on page 46).

Figure 10-1 shows the dataflow in a Hadoop MapReduce job. Its parallelization is

based on partitioning (see Chapter 6): the input to a job is typically a directory in

HDFS, and each file or file block within the input directory is considered to be a sepa‐

rate partition that can be processed by a separate map task (marked by m 1, m 2, and

m 3 in Figure 10-1).

Each input file is typically hundreds of megabytes in size. The MapReduce scheduler

(not shown in the diagram) tries to run each mapper on one of the machines that

stores a replica of the input file, provided that machine has enough spare RAM and

CPU resources to run the map task [26]. This principle is known as putting the com‐

putation near the data [27]: it saves copying the input file over the network, reducing

network load and increasing locality.

400 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

Figure 10-1. A MapReduce job with three mappers and three reducers.

In most cases, the application code that should run in the map task is not yet present

on the machine that is assigned the task of running it, so the MapReduce framework

first copies the code (e.g., JAR files in the case of a Java program) to the appropriate

machines. It then starts the map task and begins reading the input file, passing one

record at a time to the mapper callback. The output of the mapper consists of key-

value pairs.

The reduce side of the computation is also partitioned. While the number of map

tasks is determined by the number of input file blocks, the number of reduce tasks is

configured by the job author (it can be different from the number of map tasks). To

ensure that all key-value pairs with the same key end up at the same reducer, the

framework uses a hash of the key to determine which reduce task should receive a

particular key-value pair (see “Partitioning by Hash of Key” on page 203).

The key-value pairs must be sorted, but the dataset is likely too large to be sorted with

a conventional sorting algorithm on a single machine. Instead, the sorting is per‐

formed in stages. First, each map task partitions its output by reducer, based on the

hash of the key. Each of these partitions is written to a sorted file on the mapper’s

local disk, using a technique similar to what we discussed in “SSTables and LSM-

Trees” on page 76.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 401

Whenever a mapper finishes reading its input file and writing its sorted output files,

the MapReduce scheduler notifies the reducers that they can start fetching the output

files from that mapper. The reducers connect to each of the mappers and download

the files of sorted key-value pairs for their partition. The process of partitioning by

reducer, sorting, and copying data partitions from mappers to reducers is known as

the shuffle [26] (a confusing term—unlike shuffling a deck of cards, there is no randomness in MapReduce).

The reduce task takes the files from the mappers and merges them together, preserv‐

ing the sort order. Thus, if different mappers produced records with the same key,

they will be adjacent in the merged reducer input.

The reducer is called with a key and an iterator that incrementally scans over all

records with the same key (which may in some cases not all fit in memory). The

reducer can use arbitrary logic to process these records, and can generate any number

of output records. These output records are written to a file on the distributed filesys‐

tem (usually, one copy on the local disk of the machine running the reducer, with

replicas on other machines).

MapReduce workflows

The range of problems you can solve with a single MapReduce job is limited. Refer‐

ring back to the log analysis example, a single MapReduce job could determine the

number of page views per URL, but not the most popular URLs, since that requires a

second round of sorting.

Thus, it is very common for MapReduce jobs to be chained together into workflows,

such that the output of one job becomes the input to the next job. The Hadoop Map‐

Reduce framework does not have any particular support for workflows, so this chain‐

ing is done implicitly by directory name: the first job must be configured to write its

output to a designated directory in HDFS, and the second job must be configured to

read that same directory name as its input. From the MapReduce framework’s point

of view, they are two independent jobs.

Chained MapReduce jobs are therefore less like pipelines of Unix commands (which

pass the output of one process as input to another process directly, using only a small

in-memory buffer) and more like a sequence of commands where each command’s

output is written to a temporary file, and the next command reads from the tempo‐

rary file. This design has advantages and disadvantages, which we will discuss in

“Materialization of Intermediate State” on page 419.

A batch job’s output is only considered valid when the job has completed successfully

(MapReduce discards the partial output of a failed job). Therefore, one job in a work‐

flow can only start when the prior jobs—that is, the jobs that produce its input direc‐

tories—have completed successfully. To handle these dependencies between job

402 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

executions, various workflow schedulers for Hadoop have been developed, including

Oozie, Azkaban, Luigi, Airflow, and Pinball [28].

These schedulers also have management features that are useful when maintaining a

large collection of batch jobs. Workflows consisting of 50 to 100 MapReduce jobs are

common when building recommendation systems [29], and in a large organization,

many different teams may be running different jobs that read each other’s output.

Tool support is important for managing such complex dataflows.

Various higher-level tools for Hadoop, such as Pig [30], Hive [31], Cascading [32],

Crunch [33], and FlumeJava [34], also set up workflows of multiple MapReduce

stages that are automatically wired together appropriately.

Reduce-Side Joins and Grouping

We discussed joins in Chapter 2 in the context of data models and query languages,

but we have not delved into how joins are actually implemented. It is time that we

pick up that thread again.

In many datasets it is common for one record to have an association with another

record: a foreign key in a relational model, a document reference in a document

model, or an edge in a graph model. A join is necessary whenever you have some

code that needs to access records on both sides of that association (both the record

that holds the reference and the record being referenced). As discussed in Chapter 2,

denormalization can reduce the need for joins but generally not remove it entirely.v

In a database, if you execute a query that involves only a small number of records, the

database will typically use an index to quickly locate the records of interest (see Chap‐

ter 3). If the query involves joins, it may require multiple index lookups. However,

MapReduce has no concept of indexes—at least not in the usual sense.

When a MapReduce job is given a set of files as input, it reads the entire content of all

of those files; a database would call this operation a full table scan. If you only want to

read a small number of records, a full table scan is outrageously expensive compared

to an index lookup. However, in analytic queries (see “Transaction Processing or

Analytics?” on page 90) it is common to want to calculate aggregates over a large

number of records. In this case, scanning the entire input might be quite a reasonable

thing to do, especially if you can parallelize the processing across multiple machines.

v. The joins we talk about in this book are generally equi-joins, the most common type of join, in which a record is associated with other records that have an identical value in a particular field (such as an ID). Some databases support more general types of joins, for example using a less-than operator instead of an equality operator, but we do not have space to cover them here.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 403

When we talk about joins in the context of batch processing, we mean resolving all

occurrences of some association within a dataset. For example, we assume that a job

is processing the data for all users simultaneously, not merely looking up the data for

one particular user (which would be done far more efficiently with an index).

Example: analysis of user activity events

A typical example of a join in a batch job is illustrated in Figure 10-2. On the left is a log of events describing the things that logged-in users did on a website (known as activity events or clickstream data), and on the right is a database of users. You can

think of this example as being part of a star schema (see “Stars and Snowflakes: Sche‐

mas for Analytics” on page 93): the log of events is the fact table, and the user data‐

base is one of the dimensions.

Figure 10-2. A join between a log of user activity events and a database of user profiles.

An analytics task may need to correlate user activity with user profile information:

for example, if the profile contains the user’s age or date of birth, the system could

determine which pages are most popular with which age groups. However, the activ‐

ity events contain only the user ID, not the full user profile information. Embedding

that profile information in every single activity event would most likely be too waste‐

ful. Therefore, the activity events need to be joined with the user profile database.

The simplest implementation of this join would go over the activity events one by

one and query the user database (on a remote server) for every user ID it encounters.

This is possible, but it would most likely suffer from very poor performance: the pro‐

cessing throughput would be limited by the round-trip time to the database server,

the effectiveness of a local cache would depend very much on the distribution of data,

and running a large number of queries in parallel could easily overwhelm the data‐

base [35].

404 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

In order to achieve good throughput in a batch process, the computation must be (as

much as possible) local to one machine. Making random-access requests over the

network for every record you want to process is too slow. Moreover, querying a

remote database would mean that the batch job becomes nondeterministic, because

the data in the remote database might change.

Thus, a better approach would be to take a copy of the user database (for example,

extracted from a database backup using an ETL process—see “Data Warehousing” on

page 91) and to put it in the same distributed filesystem as the log of user activity

events. You would then have the user database in one set of files in HDFS and the

user activity records in another set of files, and could use MapReduce to bring

together all of the relevant records in the same place and process them efficiently.

Sort-merge joins

Recall that the purpose of the mapper is to extract a key and value from each input

record. In the case of Figure 10-2, this key would be the user ID: one set of mappers

would go over the activity events (extracting the user ID as the key and the activity

event as the value), while another set of mappers would go over the user database

(extracting the user ID as the key and the user’s date of birth as the value). This pro‐

cess is illustrated in Figure 10-3.

Figure 10-3. A reduce-side sort-merge join on user ID. If the input datasets are parti‐

tioned into multiple files, each could be processed with multiple mappers in parallel.

When the MapReduce framework partitions the mapper output by key and then sorts

the key-value pairs, the effect is that all the activity events and the user record with

the same user ID become adjacent to each other in the reducer input. The Map‐

Reduce job can even arrange the records to be sorted such that the reducer always

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 405

sees the record from the user database first, followed by the activity events in time‐

stamp order—this technique is known as a secondary sort [26].

The reducer can then perform the actual join logic easily: the reducer function is

called once for every user ID, and thanks to the secondary sort, the first value is

expected to be the date-of-birth record from the user database. The reducer stores the

date of birth in a local variable and then iterates over the activity events with the same

user ID, outputting pairs of viewed-url and viewer-age-in-years. Subsequent Map‐

Reduce jobs could then calculate the distribution of viewer ages for each URL, and

cluster by age group.

Since the reducer processes all of the records for a particular user ID in one go, it only

needs to keep one user record in memory at any one time, and it never needs to make

any requests over the network. This algorithm is known as a sort-merge join, since

mapper output is sorted by key, and the reducers then merge together the sorted lists

of records from both sides of the join.

Bringing related data together in the same place

In a sort-merge join, the mappers and the sorting process make sure that all the nec‐

essary data to perform the join operation for a particular user ID is brought together

in the same place: a single call to the reducer. Having lined up all the required data in

advance, the reducer can be a fairly simple, single-threaded piece of code that can

churn through records with high throughput and low memory overhead.

One way of looking at this architecture is that mappers “send messages” to the reduc‐

ers. When a mapper emits a key-value pair, the key acts like the destination address

to which the value should be delivered. Even though the key is just an arbitrary string

(not an actual network address like an IP address and port number), it behaves like

an address: all key-value pairs with the same key will be delivered to the same desti‐

nation (a call to the reducer).

Using the MapReduce programming model has separated the physical network com‐

munication aspects of the computation (getting the data to the right machine) from

the application logic (processing the data once you have it). This separation contrasts

with the typical use of databases, where a request to fetch data from a database often

occurs somewhere deep inside a piece of application code [36]. Since MapReduce

handles all network communication, it also shields the application code from having

to worry about partial failures, such as the crash of another node: MapReduce trans‐

parently retries failed tasks without affecting the application logic.

GROUP BY

Besides joins, another common use of the “bringing related data to the same place”

pattern is grouping records by some key (as in the GROUP BY clause in SQL). All

406 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

records with the same key form a group, and the next step is often to perform some

kind of aggregation within each group—for example:

• Counting the number of records in each group (like in our example of counting

page views, which you would express as a COUNT(*) aggregation in SQL)

• Adding up the values in one particular field (SUM(fieldname)) in SQL

• Picking the top k records according to some ranking function

The simplest way of implementing such a grouping operation with MapReduce is to

set up the mappers so that the key-value pairs they produce use the desired grouping

key. The partitioning and sorting process then brings together all the records with the

same key in the same reducer. Thus, grouping and joining look quite similar when

implemented on top of MapReduce.

Another common use for grouping is collating all the activity events for a particular

user session, in order to find out the sequence of actions that the user took—a pro‐

cess called sessionization [37]. For example, such analysis could be used to work out

whether users who were shown a new version of your website are more likely to make

a purchase than those who were shown the old version (A/B testing), or to calculate

whether some marketing activity is worthwhile.

If you have multiple web servers handling user requests, the activity events for a par‐

ticular user are most likely scattered across various different servers’ log files. You can

implement sessionization by using a session cookie, user ID, or similar identifier as

the grouping key and bringing all the activity events for a particular user together in

one place, while distributing different users’ events across different partitions.

Handling skew

The pattern of “bringing all records with the same key to the same place” breaks

down if there is a very large amount of data related to a single key. For example, in a

social network, most users might be connected to a few hundred people, but a small

number of celebrities may have many millions of followers. Such disproportionately

active database records are known as linchpin objects [38] or hot keys.

Collecting all activity related to a celebrity (e.g., replies to something they posted) in a

single reducer can lead to significant skew (also known as hot spots)—that is, one

reducer that must process significantly more records than the others (see “Skewed

Workloads and Relieving Hot Spots” on page 205). Since a MapReduce job is only

complete when all of its mappers and reducers have completed, any subsequent jobs

must wait for the slowest reducer to complete before they can start.

If a join input has hot keys, there are a few algorithms you can use to compensate.

For example, the skewed join method in Pig first runs a sampling job to determine

which keys are hot [39]. When performing the actual join, the mappers send any

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 407

records relating to a hot key to one of several reducers, chosen at random (in contrast

to conventional MapReduce, which chooses a reducer deterministically based on a

hash of the key). For the other input to the join, records relating to the hot key need

to be replicated to all reducers handling that key [40].

This technique spreads the work of handling the hot key over several reducers, which

allows it to be parallelized better, at the cost of having to replicate the other join input

to multiple reducers. The sharded join method in Crunch is similar, but requires the

hot keys to be specified explicitly rather than using a sampling job. This technique is

also very similar to one we discussed in “Skewed Workloads and Relieving Hot

Spots” on page 205, using randomization to alleviate hot spots in a partitioned data‐

base.

Hive’s skewed join optimization takes an alternative approach. It requires hot keys to

be specified explicitly in the table metadata, and it stores records related to those keys

in separate files from the rest. When performing a join on that table, it uses a map-

side join (see the next section) for the hot keys.

When grouping records by a hot key and aggregating them, you can perform the

grouping in two stages. The first MapReduce stage sends records to a random

reducer, so that each reducer performs the grouping on a subset of records for the

hot key and outputs a more compact aggregated value per key. The second Map‐

Reduce job then combines the values from all of the first-stage reducers into a single

value per key.

Map-Side Joins

The join algorithms described in the last section perform the actual join logic in the

reducers, and are hence known as reduce-side joins. The mappers take the role of pre‐

paring the input data: extracting the key and value from each input record, assigning

the key-value pairs to a reducer partition, and sorting by key.

The reduce-side approach has the advantage that you do not need to make any

assumptions about the input data: whatever its properties and structure, the mappers

can prepare the data to be ready for joining. However, the downside is that all that

sorting, copying to reducers, and merging of reducer inputs can be quite expensive.

Depending on the available memory buffers, data may be written to disk several

times as it passes through the stages of MapReduce [37].

On the other hand, if you can make certain assumptions about your input data, it is

possible to make joins faster by using a so-called map-side join. This approach uses a

cut-down MapReduce job in which there are no reducers and no sorting. Instead,

each mapper simply reads one input file block from the distributed filesystem and

writes one output file to the filesystem—that is all.

408 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

Broadcast hash joins

The simplest way of performing a map-side join applies in the case where a large

dataset is joined with a small dataset. In particular, the small dataset needs to be small

enough that it can be loaded entirely into memory in each of the mappers.

For example, imagine in the case of Figure 10-2 that the user database is small

enough to fit in memory. In this case, when a mapper starts up, it can first read the

user database from the distributed filesystem into an in-memory hash table. Once

this is done, the mapper can scan over the user activity events and simply look up the

user ID for each event in the hash table.vi

There can still be several map tasks: one for each file block of the large input to the

join (in the example of Figure 10-2, the activity events are the large input). Each of

these mappers loads the small input entirely into memory.

This simple but effective algorithm is called a broadcast hash join: the word broadcast

reflects the fact that each mapper for a partition of the large input reads the entirety

of the small input (so the small input is effectively “broadcast” to all partitions of the

large input), and the word hash reflects its use of a hash table. This join method is

supported by Pig (under the name “replicated join”), Hive (“MapJoin”), Cascading,

and Crunch. It is also used in data warehouse query engines such as Impala [41].

Instead of loading the small join input into an in-memory hash table, an alternative is

to store the small join input in a read-only index on the local disk [42]. The fre‐

quently used parts of this index will remain in the operating system’s page cache, so

this approach can provide random-access lookups almost as fast as an in-memory

hash table, but without actually requiring the dataset to fit in memory.

Partitioned hash joins

If the inputs to the map-side join are partitioned in the same way, then the hash join

approach can be applied to each partition independently. In the case of Figure 10-2,

you might arrange for the activity events and the user database to each be partitioned

based on the last decimal digit of the user ID (so there are 10 partitions on either

side). For example, mapper 3 first loads all users with an ID ending in 3 into a hash

table, and then scans over all the activity events for each user whose ID ends in 3.

If the partitioning is done correctly, you can be sure that all the records you might

want to join are located in the same numbered partition, and so it is sufficient for

each mapper to only read one partition from each of the input datasets. This has the

advantage that each mapper can load a smaller amount of data into its hash table.

vi. This example assumes that there is exactly one entry for each key in the hash table, which is probably true with a user database (a user ID uniquely identifies a user). In general, the hash table may need to contain several entries with the same key, and the join operator will output all matches for a key.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 409

This approach only works if both of the join’s inputs have the same number of parti‐

tions, with records assigned to partitions based on the same key and the same hash

function. If the inputs are generated by prior MapReduce jobs that already perform

this grouping, then this can be a reasonable assumption to make.

Partitioned hash joins are known as bucketed map joins in Hive [37].

Map-side merge joins

Another variant of a map-side join applies if the input datasets are not only parti‐

tioned in the same way, but also sorted based on the same key. In this case, it does not

matter whether the inputs are small enough to fit in memory, because a mapper can

perform the same merging operation that would normally be done by a reducer:

reading both input files incrementally, in order of ascending key, and matching

records with the same key.

If a map-side merge join is possible, it probably means that prior MapReduce jobs

brought the input datasets into this partitioned and sorted form in the first place. In

principle, this join could have been performed in the reduce stage of the prior job.

However, it may still be appropriate to perform the merge join in a separate map-

only job, for example if the partitioned and sorted datasets are also needed for other

purposes besides this particular join.

MapReduce workflows with map-side joins

When the output of a MapReduce join is consumed by downstream jobs, the choice

of map-side or reduce-side join affects the structure of the output. The output of a

reduce-side join is partitioned and sorted by the join key, whereas the output of a

map-side join is partitioned and sorted in the same way as the large input (since one

map task is started for each file block of the join’s large input, regardless of whether a

partitioned or broadcast join is used).

As discussed, map-side joins also make more assumptions about the size, sorting, and

partitioning of their input datasets. Knowing about the physical layout of datasets in

the distributed filesystem becomes important when optimizing join strategies: it is

not sufficient to just know the encoding format and the name of the directory in

which the data is stored; you must also know the number of partitions and the keys

by which the data is partitioned and sorted.

In the Hadoop ecosystem, this kind of metadata about the partitioning of datasets is

often maintained in HCatalog and the Hive metastore [37].

410 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

The Output of Batch Workflows

We have talked a lot about the various algorithms for implementing workflows of

MapReduce jobs, but we neglected an important question: what is the result of all of

that processing, once it is done? Why are we running all these jobs in the first place?

In the case of database queries, we distinguished transaction processing (OLTP) pur‐

poses from analytic purposes (see “Transaction Processing or Analytics?” on page

90). We saw that OLTP queries generally look up a small number of records by key,

using indexes, in order to present them to a user (for example, on a web page). On

the other hand, analytic queries often scan over a large number of records, perform‐

ing groupings and aggregations, and the output often has the form of a report: a

graph showing the change in a metric over time, or the top 10 items according to

some ranking, or a breakdown of some quantity into subcategories. The consumer of

such a report is often an analyst or a manager who needs to make business decisions.

Where does batch processing fit in? It is not transaction processing, nor is it analyt‐

ics. It is closer to analytics, in that a batch process typically scans over large portions

of an input dataset. However, a workflow of MapReduce jobs is not the same as a

SQL query used for analytic purposes (see “Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Data‐

bases” on page 414). The output of a batch process is often not a report, but some

other kind of structure.

Building search indexes

Google’s original use of MapReduce was to build indexes for its search engine, which

was implemented as a workflow of 5 to 10 MapReduce jobs [1]. Although Google

later moved away from using MapReduce for this purpose [43], it helps to under‐

stand MapReduce if you look at it through the lens of building a search index. (Even

today, Hadoop MapReduce remains a good way of building indexes for Lucene/Solr

[44].)

We saw briefly in “Full-text search and fuzzy indexes” on page 88 how a full-text

search index such as Lucene works: it is a file (the term dictionary) in which you can

efficiently look up a particular keyword and find the list of all the document IDs con‐

taining that keyword (the postings list). This is a very simplified view of a search

index—in reality it requires various additional data, in order to rank search results by

relevance, correct misspellings, resolve synonyms, and so on—but the principle

holds.

If you need to perform a full-text search over a fixed set of documents, then a batch

process is a very effective way of building the indexes: the mappers partition the set of

documents as needed, each reducer builds the index for its partition, and the index

files are written to the distributed filesystem. Building such document-partitioned

indexes (see “Partitioning and Secondary Indexes” on page 206) parallelizes very well.

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 411

Since querying a search index by keyword is a read-only operation, these index files

are immutable once they have been created.

If the indexed set of documents changes, one option is to periodically rerun the entire

indexing workflow for the entire set of documents, and replace the previous index

files wholesale with the new index files when it is done. This approach can be compu‐

tationally expensive if only a small number of documents have changed, but it has the

advantage that the indexing process is very easy to reason about: documents in,

indexes out.

Alternatively, it is possible to build indexes incrementally. As discussed in Chapter 3, if you want to add, remove, or update documents in an index, Lucene writes out new segment files and asynchronously merges and compacts segment files in the back‐

ground. We will see more on such incremental processing in Chapter 11.

Key-value stores as batch process output

Search indexes are just one example of the possible outputs of a batch processing

workflow. Another common use for batch processing is to build machine learning

systems such as classifiers (e.g., spam filters, anomaly detection, image recognition)

and recommendation systems (e.g., people you may know, products you may be

interested in, or related searches [29]).

The output of those batch jobs is often some kind of database: for example, a data‐

base that can be queried by user ID to obtain suggested friends for that user, or a

database that can be queried by product ID to get a list of related products [45].

These databases need to be queried from the web application that handles user

requests, which is usually separate from the Hadoop infrastructure. So how does the

output from the batch process get back into a database where the web application can

query it?

The most obvious choice might be to use the client library for your favorite database

directly within a mapper or reducer, and to write from the batch job directly to the

database server, one record at a time. This will work (assuming your firewall rules

allow direct access from your Hadoop environment to your production databases),

but it is a bad idea for several reasons:

• As discussed previously in the context of joins, making a network request for

every single record is orders of magnitude slower than the normal throughput of

a batch task. Even if the client library supports batching, performance is likely to

be poor.

• MapReduce jobs often run many tasks in parallel. If all the mappers or reducers

concurrently write to the same output database, with a rate expected of a batch

process, that database can easily be overwhelmed, and its performance for quer‐

412 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

ies is likely to suffer. This can in turn cause operational problems in other parts

of the system [35].

• Normally, MapReduce provides a clean all-or-nothing guarantee for job output:

if a job succeeds, the result is the output of running every task exactly once, even

if some tasks failed and had to be retried along the way; if the entire job fails, no

output is produced. However, writing to an external system from inside a job

produces externally visible side effects that cannot be hidden in this way. Thus,

you have to worry about the results from partially completed jobs being visible to

other systems, and the complexities of Hadoop task attempts and speculative

execution.

A much better solution is to build a brand-new database inside the batch job and

write it as files to the job’s output directory in the distributed filesystem, just like the

search indexes in the last section. Those data files are then immutable once written,

and can be loaded in bulk into servers that handle read-only queries. Various key-

value stores support building database files in MapReduce jobs, including Voldemort

[46], Terrapin [47], ElephantDB [48], and HBase bulk loading [49].

Building these database files is a good use of MapReduce: using a mapper to extract a

key and then sorting by that key is already a lot of the work required to build an

index. Since most of these key-value stores are read-only (the files can only be written

once by a batch job and are then immutable), the data structures are quite simple. For

example, they do not require a WAL (see “Making B-trees reliable” on page 82).

When loading data into Voldemort, the server continues serving requests to the old

data files while the new data files are copied from the distributed filesystem to the

server’s local disk. Once the copying is complete, the server atomically switches over

to querying the new files. If anything goes wrong in this process, it can easily switch

back to the old files again, since they are still there and immutable [46].

Philosophy of batch process outputs

The Unix philosophy that we discussed earlier in this chapter (“The Unix Philoso‐

phy” on page 394) encourages experimentation by being very explicit about dataflow:

a program reads its input and writes its output. In the process, the input is left

unchanged, any previous output is completely replaced with the new output, and

there are no other side effects. This means that you can rerun a command as often as

you like, tweaking or debugging it, without messing up the state of your system.

The handling of output from MapReduce jobs follows the same philosophy. By treat‐

ing inputs as immutable and avoiding side effects (such as writing to external data‐

bases), batch jobs not only achieve good performance but also become much easier to

maintain:

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 413

• If you introduce a bug into the code and the output is wrong or corrupted, you

can simply roll back to a previous version of the code and rerun the job, and the

output will be correct again. Or, even simpler, you can keep the old output in a

different directory and simply switch back to it. Databases with read-write trans‐

actions do not have this property: if you deploy buggy code that writes bad data

to the database, then rolling back the code will do nothing to fix the data in the

database. (The idea of being able to recover from buggy code has been called

human fault tolerance [50].)

• As a consequence of this ease of rolling back, feature development can proceed

more quickly than in an environment where mistakes could mean irreversible

damage. This principle of minimizing irreversibility is beneficial for Agile soft‐

ware development [51].

• If a map or reduce task fails, the MapReduce framework automatically re-

schedules it and runs it again on the same input. If the failure is due to a bug in

the code, it will keep crashing and eventually cause the job to fail after a few

attempts; but if the failure is due to a transient issue, the fault is tolerated. This

automatic retry is only safe because inputs are immutable and outputs from

failed tasks are discarded by the MapReduce framework.

• The same set of files can be used as input for various different jobs, including

monitoring jobs that calculate metrics and evaluate whether a job’s output has

the expected characteristics (for example, by comparing it to the output from the

previous run and measuring discrepancies).

• Like Unix tools, MapReduce jobs separate logic from wiring (configuring the

input and output directories), which provides a separation of concerns and ena‐

bles potential reuse of code: one team can focus on implementing a job that does

one thing well, while other teams can decide where and when to run that job.

In these areas, the design principles that worked well for Unix also seem to be work‐

ing well for Hadoop—but Unix and Hadoop also differ in some ways. For example,

because most Unix tools assume untyped text files, they have to do a lot of input

parsing (our log analysis example at the beginning of the chapter used {print $7} to

extract the URL). On Hadoop, some of those low-value syntactic conversions are

eliminated by using more structured file formats: Avro (see “Avro” on page 122) and

Parquet (see “Column-Oriented Storage” on page 95) are often used, as they provide

efficient schema-based encoding and allow evolution of their schemas over time (see

Chapter 4).

Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases

As we have seen, Hadoop is somewhat like a distributed version of Unix, where

HDFS is the filesystem and MapReduce is a quirky implementation of a Unix process

414 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

(which happens to always run the sort utility between the map phase and the reduce

phase). We saw how you can implement various join and grouping operations on top

of these primitives.

When the MapReduce paper [1] was published, it was—in some sense—not at all

new. All of the processing and parallel join algorithms that we discussed in the last

few sections had already been implemented in so-called massively parallel processing

(MPP) databases more than a decade previously [3, 40]. For example, the Gamma

database machine, Teradata, and Tandem NonStop SQL were pioneers in this area

[52].

The biggest difference is that MPP databases focus on parallel execution of analytic

SQL queries on a cluster of machines, while the combination of MapReduce and a

distributed filesystem [19] provides something much more like a general-purpose

operating system that can run arbitrary programs.

Diversity of storage

Databases require you to structure data according to a particular model (e.g., rela‐

tional or documents), whereas files in a distributed filesystem are just byte sequences,

which can be written using any data model and encoding. They might be collections

of database records, but they can equally well be text, images, videos, sensor readings,

sparse matrices, feature vectors, genome sequences, or any other kind of data.

To put it bluntly, Hadoop opened up the possibility of indiscriminately dumping data

into HDFS, and only later figuring out how to process it further [53]. By contrast,

MPP databases typically require careful up-front modeling of the data and query pat‐

terns before importing the data into the database’s proprietary storage format.

From a purist’s point of view, it may seem that this careful modeling and import is

desirable, because it means users of the database have better-quality data to work

with. However, in practice, it appears that simply making data available quickly—

even if it is in a quirky, difficult-to-use, raw format—is often more valuable than try‐

ing to decide on the ideal data model up front [54].

The idea is similar to a data warehouse (see “Data Warehousing” on page 91): simply

bringing data from various parts of a large organization together in one place is val‐

uable, because it enables joins across datasets that were previously disparate. The

careful schema design required by an MPP database slows down that centralized data

collection; collecting data in its raw form, and worrying about schema design later,

allows the data collection to be speeded up (a concept sometimes known as a “data

lake” or “enterprise data hub” [55]).

Indiscriminate data dumping shifts the burden of interpreting the data: instead of

forcing the producer of a dataset to bring it into a standardized format, the interpre‐

tation of the data becomes the consumer’s problem (the schema-on-read approach

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 415

[56]; see “Schema flexibility in the document model” on page 39). This can be an

advantage if the producer and consumers are different teams with different priorities.

There may not even be one ideal data model, but rather different views onto the data

that are suitable for different purposes. Simply dumping data in its raw form allows

for several such transformations. This approach has been dubbed the sushi principle:

“raw data is better” [57].

Thus, Hadoop has often been used for implementing ETL processes (see “Data Ware‐

housing” on page 91): data from transaction processing systems is dumped into the

distributed filesystem in some raw form, and then MapReduce jobs are written to

clean up that data, transform it into a relational form, and import it into an MPP data

warehouse for analytic purposes. Data modeling still happens, but it is in a separate

step, decoupled from the data collection. This decoupling is possible because a dis‐

tributed filesystem supports data encoded in any format.

Diversity of processing models

MPP databases are monolithic, tightly integrated pieces of software that take care of

storage layout on disk, query planning, scheduling, and execution. Since these com‐

ponents can all be tuned and optimized for the specific needs of the database, the sys‐

tem as a whole can achieve very good performance on the types of queries for which

it is designed. Moreover, the SQL query language allows expressive queries and ele‐

gant semantics without the need to write code, making it accessible to graphical tools

used by business analysts (such as Tableau).

On the other hand, not all kinds of processing can be sensibly expressed as SQL quer‐

ies. For example, if you are building machine learning and recommendation systems,

or full-text search indexes with relevance ranking models, or performing image anal‐

ysis, you most likely need a more general model of data processing. These kinds of

processing are often very specific to a particular application (e.g., feature engineering

for machine learning, natural language models for machine translation, risk estima‐

tion functions for fraud prediction), so they inevitably require writing code, not just

queries.

MapReduce gave engineers the ability to easily run their own code over large data‐

sets. If you have HDFS and MapReduce, you can build a SQL query execution engine

on top of it, and indeed this is what the Hive project did [31]. However, you can also

write many other forms of batch processes that do not lend themselves to being

expressed as a SQL query.

Subsequently, people found that MapReduce was too limiting and performed too

badly for some types of processing, so various other processing models were devel‐

oped on top of Hadoop (we will see some of them in “Beyond MapReduce” on page

419). Having two processing models, SQL and MapReduce, was not enough: even

more different models were needed! And due to the openness of the Hadoop plat‐

416 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

form, it was feasible to implement a whole range of approaches, which would not

have been possible within the confines of a monolithic MPP database [58].

Crucially, those various processing models can all be run on a single shared-use clus‐

ter of machines, all accessing the same files on the distributed filesystem. In the

Hadoop approach, there is no need to import the data into several different special‐

ized systems for different kinds of processing: the system is flexible enough to sup‐

port a diverse set of workloads within the same cluster. Not having to move data

around makes it a lot easier to derive value from the data, and a lot easier to experi‐

ment with new processing models.

The Hadoop ecosystem includes both random-access OLTP databases such as HBase

(see “SSTables and LSM-Trees” on page 76) and MPP-style analytic databases such as

Impala [41]. Neither HBase nor Impala uses MapReduce, but both use HDFS for

storage. They are very different approaches to accessing and processing data, but they

can nevertheless coexist and be integrated in the same system.

Designing for frequent faults

When comparing MapReduce to MPP databases, two more differences in design

approach stand out: the handling of faults and the use of memory and disk. Batch

processes are less sensitive to faults than online systems, because they do not immedi‐

ately affect users if they fail and they can always be run again.

If a node crashes while a query is executing, most MPP databases abort the entire

query, and either let the user resubmit the query or automatically run it again [3]. As queries normally run for a few seconds or a few minutes at most, this way of handling errors is acceptable, since the cost of retrying is not too great. MPP databases also

prefer to keep as much data as possible in memory (e.g., using hash joins) to avoid

the cost of reading from disk.

On the other hand, MapReduce can tolerate the failure of a map or reduce task

without it affecting the job as a whole by retrying work at the granularity of an indi‐

vidual task. It is also very eager to write data to disk, partly for fault tolerance, and

partly on the assumption that the dataset will be too big to fit in memory anyway.

The MapReduce approach is more appropriate for larger jobs: jobs that process so

much data and run for such a long time that they are likely to experience at least one

task failure along the way. In that case, rerunning the entire job due to a single task

failure would be wasteful. Even if recovery at the granularity of an individual task

introduces overheads that make fault-free processing slower, it can still be a reason‐

able trade-off if the rate of task failures is high enough.

But how realistic are these assumptions? In most clusters, machine failures do occur,

but they are not very frequent—probably rare enough that most jobs will not experi‐

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems | 417

ence a machine failure. Is it really worth incurring significant overheads for the sake

of fault tolerance?

To understand the reasons for MapReduce’s sparing use of memory and task-level

recovery, it is helpful to look at the environment for which MapReduce was originally

designed. Google has mixed-use datacenters, in which online production services and

offline batch jobs run on the same machines. Every task has a resource allocation

(CPU cores, RAM, disk space, etc.) that is enforced using containers. Every task also

has a priority, and if a higher-priority task needs more resources, lower-priority tasks

on the same machine can be terminated (preempted) in order to free up resources.

Priority also determines pricing of the computing resources: teams must pay for the

resources they use, and higher-priority processes cost more [59].

This architecture allows non-production (low-priority) computing resources to be

overcommitted, because the system knows that it can reclaim the resources if neces‐

sary. Overcommitting resources in turn allows better utilization of machines and

greater efficiency compared to systems that segregate production and non-

production tasks. However, as MapReduce jobs run at low priority, they run the risk

of being preempted at any time because a higher-priority process requires their

resources. Batch jobs effectively “pick up the scraps under the table,” using any com‐

puting resources that remain after the high-priority processes have taken what they

need.

At Google, a MapReduce task that runs for an hour has an approximately 5% risk of

being terminated to make space for a higher-priority process. This rate is more than

an order of magnitude higher than the rate of failures due to hardware issues,

machine reboot, or other reasons [59]. At this rate of preemptions, if a job has 100

tasks that each run for 10 minutes, there is a risk greater than 50% that at least one

task will be terminated before it is finished.

And this is why MapReduce is designed to tolerate frequent unexpected task termina‐

tion: it’s not because the hardware is particularly unreliable, it’s because the freedom

to arbitrarily terminate processes enables better resource utilization in a computing

cluster.

Among open source cluster schedulers, preemption is less widely used. YARN’s

CapacityScheduler supports preemption for balancing the resource allocation of dif‐

ferent queues [58], but general priority preemption is not supported in YARN,

Mesos, or Kubernetes at the time of writing [60]. In an environment where tasks are

not so often terminated, the design decisions of MapReduce make less sense. In the

next section, we will look at some alternatives to MapReduce that make different

design decisions.

418 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

Beyond MapReduce

Although MapReduce became very popular and received a lot of hype in the late

2000s, it is just one among many possible programming models for distributed sys‐

tems. Depending on the volume of data, the structure of the data, and the type of pro‐

cessing being done with it, other tools may be more appropriate for expressing a

computation.

We nevertheless spent a lot of time in this chapter discussing MapReduce because it

is a useful learning tool, as it is a fairly clear and simple abstraction on top of a dis‐

tributed filesystem. That is, simple in the sense of being able to understand what it is

doing, not in the sense of being easy to use. Quite the opposite: implementing a com‐

plex processing job using the raw MapReduce APIs is actually quite hard and labori‐

ous—for instance, you would need to implement any join algorithms from scratch

[37].

In response to the difficulty of using MapReduce directly, various higher-level pro‐

gramming models (Pig, Hive, Cascading, Crunch) were created as abstractions on top

of MapReduce. If you understand how MapReduce works, they are fairly easy to

learn, and their higher-level constructs make many common batch processing tasks

significantly easier to implement.

However, there are also problems with the MapReduce execution model itself, which

are not fixed by adding another level of abstraction and which manifest themselves as

poor performance for some kinds of processing. On the one hand, MapReduce is

very robust: you can use it to process almost arbitrarily large quantities of data on an

unreliable multi-tenant system with frequent task terminations, and it will still get the

job done (albeit slowly). On the other hand, other tools are sometimes orders of mag‐

nitude faster for some kinds of processing.

In the rest of this chapter, we will look at some of those alternatives for batch process‐

ing. In Chapter 11 we will move to stream processing, which can be regarded as

another way of speeding up batch processing.

Materialization of Intermediate State

As discussed previously, every MapReduce job is independent from every other job.

The main contact points of a job with the rest of the world are its input and output

directories on the distributed filesystem. If you want the output of one job to become

the input to a second job, you need to configure the second job’s input directory to be

the same as the first job’s output directory, and an external workflow scheduler must

start the second job only once the first job has completed.

This setup is reasonable if the output from the first job is a dataset that you want to

publish widely within your organization. In that case, you need to be able to refer to it

Beyond MapReduce | 419

by name and reuse it as input to several different jobs (including jobs developed by

other teams). Publishing data to a well-known location in the distributed filesystem

allows loose coupling so that jobs don’t need to know who is producing their input or

consuming their output (see “Separation of logic and wiring” on page 396).

However, in many cases, you know that the output of one job is only ever used as

input to one other job, which is maintained by the same team. In this case, the files

on the distributed filesystem are simply intermediate state: a means of passing data

from one job to the next. In the complex workflows used to build recommendation

systems consisting of 50 or 100 MapReduce jobs [29], there is a lot of such intermedi‐

ate state.

The process of writing out this intermediate state to files is called materialization.

(We came across the term previously in the context of materialized views, in “Aggre‐

gation: Data Cubes and Materialized Views” on page 101. It means to eagerly com‐

pute the result of some operation and write it out, rather than computing it on

demand when requested.)

By contrast, the log analysis example at the beginning of the chapter used Unix pipes

to connect the output of one command with the input of another. Pipes do not fully

materialize the intermediate state, but instead stream the output to the input incre‐

mentally, using only a small in-memory buffer.

MapReduce’s approach of fully materializing intermediate state has downsides com‐

pared to Unix pipes:

• A MapReduce job can only start when all tasks in the preceding jobs (that gener‐

ate its inputs) have completed, whereas processes connected by a Unix pipe are

started at the same time, with output being consumed as soon as it is produced.

Skew or varying load on different machines means that a job often has a few

straggler tasks that take much longer to complete than the others. Having to wait

until all of the preceding job’s tasks have completed slows down the execution of

the workflow as a whole.

• Mappers are often redundant: they just read back the same file that was just writ‐

ten by a reducer, and prepare it for the next stage of partitioning and sorting. In

many cases, the mapper code could be part of the previous reducer: if the reducer

output was partitioned and sorted in the same way as mapper output, then

reducers could be chained together directly, without interleaving with mapper

stages.

• Storing intermediate state in a distributed filesystem means those files are repli‐

cated across several nodes, which is often overkill for such temporary data.

420 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

Dataflow engines

In order to fix these problems with MapReduce, several new execution engines for

distributed batch computations were developed, the most well known of which are

Spark [61, 62], Tez [63, 64], and Flink [65, 66]. There are various differences in the way they are designed, but they have one thing in common: they handle an entire workflow as one job, rather than breaking it up into independent subjobs.

Since they explicitly model the flow of data through several processing stages, these

systems are known as dataflow engines. Like MapReduce, they work by repeatedly

calling a user-defined function to process one record at a time on a single thread.

They parallelize work by partitioning inputs, and they copy the output of one func‐

tion over the network to become the input to another function.

Unlike in MapReduce, these functions need not take the strict roles of alternating

map and reduce, but instead can be assembled in more flexible ways. We call these

functions operators, and the dataflow engine provides several different options for

connecting one operator’s output to another’s input:

• One option is to repartition and sort records by key, like in the shuffle stage of

MapReduce (see “Distributed execution of MapReduce” on page 400). This fea‐

ture enables sort-merge joins and grouping in the same way as in MapReduce.

• Another possibility is to take several inputs and to partition them in the same

way, but skip the sorting. This saves effort on partitioned hash joins, where the

partitioning of records is important but the order is irrelevant because building

the hash table randomizes the order anyway.

• For broadcast hash joins, the same output from one operator can be sent to all

partitions of the join operator.

This style of processing engine is based on research systems like Dryad [67] and

Nephele [68], and it offers several advantages compared to the MapReduce model:

• Expensive work such as sorting need only be performed in places where it is

actually required, rather than always happening by default between every map

and reduce stage.

• There are no unnecessary map tasks, since the work done by a mapper can often

be incorporated into the preceding reduce operator (because a mapper does not

change the partitioning of a dataset).

• Because all joins and data dependencies in a workflow are explicitly declared, the

scheduler has an overview of what data is required where, so it can make locality

optimizations. For example, it can try to place the task that consumes some data

on the same machine as the task that produces it, so that the data can be

Beyond MapReduce | 421

exchanged through a shared memory buffer rather than having to copy it over

the network.

• It is usually sufficient for intermediate state between operators to be kept in

memory or written to local disk, which requires less I/O than writing it to HDFS

(where it must be replicated to several machines and written to disk on each rep‐

lica). MapReduce already uses this optimization for mapper output, but dataflow

engines generalize the idea to all intermediate state.

• Operators can start executing as soon as their input is ready; there is no need to

wait for the entire preceding stage to finish before the next one starts.

• Existing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) processes can be reused to run new opera‐

tors, reducing startup overheads compared to MapReduce (which launches a

new JVM for each task).

You can use dataflow engines to implement the same computations as MapReduce

workflows, and they usually execute significantly faster due to the optimizations

described here. Since operators are a generalization of map and reduce, the same pro‐

cessing code can run on either execution engine: workflows implemented in Pig,

Hive, or Cascading can be switched from MapReduce to Tez or Spark with a simple

configuration change, without modifying code [64].

Tez is a fairly thin library that relies on the YARN shuffle service for the actual copy‐

ing of data between nodes [58], whereas Spark and Flink are big frameworks that

include their own network communication layer, scheduler, and user-facing APIs.

We will discuss those high-level APIs shortly.

Fault tolerance

An advantage of fully materializing intermediate state to a distributed filesystem is

that it is durable, which makes fault tolerance fairly easy in MapReduce: if a task fails,

it can just be restarted on another machine and read the same input again from the

filesystem.

Spark, Flink, and Tez avoid writing intermediate state to HDFS, so they take a differ‐

ent approach to tolerating faults: if a machine fails and the intermediate state on that

machine is lost, it is recomputed from other data that is still available (a prior inter‐

mediary stage if possible, or otherwise the original input data, which is normally on

HDFS).

To enable this recomputation, the framework must keep track of how a given piece of

data was computed—which input partitions it used, and which operators were

applied to it. Spark uses the resilient distributed dataset (RDD) abstraction for track‐

ing the ancestry of data [61], while Flink checkpoints operator state, allowing it to

resume running an operator that ran into a fault during its execution [66].

422 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

When recomputing data, it is important to know whether the computation is deter‐

ministic: that is, given the same input data, do the operators always produce the same

output? This question matters if some of the lost data has already been sent to down‐

stream operators. If the operator is restarted and the recomputed data is not the same

as the original lost data, it becomes very hard for downstream operators to resolve the

contradictions between the old and new data. The solution in the case of nondeter‐

ministic operators is normally to kill the downstream operators as well, and run them

again on the new data.

In order to avoid such cascading faults, it is better to make operators deterministic.

Note however that it is easy for nondeterministic behavior to accidentally creep in:

for example, many programming languages do not guarantee any particular order

when iterating over elements of a hash table, many probabilistic and statistical

algorithms explicitly rely on using random numbers, and any use of the system clock

or external data sources is nondeterministic. Such causes of nondeterminism need to

be removed in order to reliably recover from faults, for example by generating

pseudorandom numbers using a fixed seed.

Recovering from faults by recomputing data is not always the right answer: if the

intermediate data is much smaller than the source data, or if the computation is very

CPU-intensive, it is probably cheaper to materialize the intermediate data to files

than to recompute it.

Discussion of materialization

Returning to the Unix analogy, we saw that MapReduce is like writing the output of

each command to a temporary file, whereas dataflow engines look much more like

Unix pipes. Flink especially is built around the idea of pipelined execution: that is,

incrementally passing the output of an operator to other operators, and not waiting

for the input to be complete before starting to process it.

A sorting operation inevitably needs to consume its entire input before it can pro‐

duce any output, because it’s possible that the very last input record is the one with

the lowest key and thus needs to be the very first output record. Any operator that

requires sorting will thus need to accumulate state, at least temporarily. But many

other parts of a workflow can be executed in a pipelined manner.

When the job completes, its output needs to go somewhere durable so that users can

find it and use it—most likely, it is written to the distributed filesystem again. Thus,

when using a dataflow engine, materialized datasets on HDFS are still usually the

inputs and the final outputs of a job. Like with MapReduce, the inputs are immutable

and the output is completely replaced. The improvement over MapReduce is that you

save yourself writing all the intermediate state to the filesystem as well.

Beyond MapReduce | 423

Graphs and Iterative Processing

In “Graph-Like Data Models” on page 49 we discussed using graphs for modeling

data, and using graph query languages to traverse the edges and vertices in a graph.

The discussion in Chapter 2 was focused around OLTP-style use: quickly executing

queries to find a small number of vertices matching certain criteria.

It is also interesting to look at graphs in a batch processing context, where the goal is

to perform some kind of offline processing or analysis on an entire graph. This need

often arises in machine learning applications such as recommendation engines, or in

ranking systems. For example, one of the most famous graph analysis algorithms is

PageRank [69], which tries to estimate the popularity of a web page based on what

other web pages link to it. It is used as part of the formula that determines the order

in which web search engines present their results.

Dataflow engines like Spark, Flink, and Tez (see “Materialization of

Intermediate State” on page 419) typically arrange the operators in

a job as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is not the same as

graph processing: in dataflow engines, the flow of data from one

operator to another is structured as a graph, while the data itself

typically consists of relational-style tuples. In graph processing, the

data itself has the form of a graph. Another unfortunate naming

confusion!

Many graph algorithms are expressed by traversing one edge at a time, joining one

vertex with an adjacent vertex in order to propagate some information, and repeating

until some condition is met—for example, until there are no more edges to follow, or

until some metric converges. We saw an example in Figure 2-6, which made a list of

all the locations in North America contained in a database by repeatedly following

edges indicating which location is within which other location (this kind of algorithm

is called a transitive closure).

It is possible to store a graph in a distributed filesystem (in files containing lists of

vertices and edges), but this idea of “repeating until done” cannot be expressed in

plain MapReduce, since it only performs a single pass over the data. This kind of

algorithm is thus often implemented in an iterative style:

1. An external scheduler runs a batch process to calculate one step of the algorithm.

2. When the batch process completes, the scheduler checks whether it has finished

(based on the completion condition—e.g., there are no more edges to follow, or

the change compared to the last iteration is below some threshold).

3. If it has not yet finished, the scheduler goes back to step 1 and runs another

round of the batch process.

424 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

This approach works, but implementing it with MapReduce is often very inefficient,

because MapReduce does not account for the iterative nature of the algorithm: it will

always read the entire input dataset and produce a completely new output dataset,

even if only a small part of the graph has changed compared to the last iteration.

The Pregel processing model

As an optimization for batch processing graphs, the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP)

model of computation [70] has become popular. Among others, it is implemented by

Apache Giraph [37], Spark’s GraphX API, and Flink’s Gelly API [71]. It is also known as the Pregel model, as Google’s Pregel paper popularized this approach for processing graphs [72].

Recall that in MapReduce, mappers conceptually “send a message” to a particular call

of the reducer because the framework collects together all the mapper outputs with

the same key. A similar idea is behind Pregel: one vertex can “send a message” to

another vertex, and typically those messages are sent along the edges in a graph.

In each iteration, a function is called for each vertex, passing it all the messages that

were sent to it—much like a call to the reducer. The difference from MapReduce is

that in the Pregel model, a vertex remembers its state in memory from one iteration

to the next, so the function only needs to process new incoming messages. If no mes‐

sages are being sent in some part of the graph, no work needs to be done.

It’s a bit similar to the actor model (see “Distributed actor frameworks” on page 138),

if you think of each vertex as an actor, except that vertex state and messages between

vertices are fault-tolerant and durable, and communication proceeds in fixed rounds:

at every iteration, the framework delivers all messages sent in the previous iteration.

Actors normally have no such timing guarantee.

Fault tolerance

The fact that vertices can only communicate by message passing (not by querying

each other directly) helps improve the performance of Pregel jobs, since messages can

be batched and there is less waiting for communication. The only waiting is between

iterations: since the Pregel model guarantees that all messages sent in one iteration

are delivered in the next iteration, the prior iteration must completely finish, and all

of its messages must be copied over the network, before the next one can start.

Even though the underlying network may drop, duplicate, or arbitrarily delay mes‐

sages (see “Unreliable Networks” on page 277), Pregel implementations guarantee

that messages are processed exactly once at their destination vertex in the following

iteration. Like MapReduce, the framework transparently recovers from faults in

order to simplify the programming model for algorithms on top of Pregel.

Beyond MapReduce | 425

This fault tolerance is achieved by periodically checkpointing the state of all vertices

at the end of an iteration—i.e., writing their full state to durable storage. If a node

fails and its in-memory state is lost, the simplest solution is to roll back the entire

graph computation to the last checkpoint and restart the computation. If the algo‐

rithm is deterministic and messages are logged, it is also possible to selectively

recover only the partition that was lost (like we previously discussed for dataflow

engines) [72].

Parallel execution

A vertex does not need to know on which physical machine it is executing; when it

sends messages to other vertices, it simply sends them to a vertex ID. It is up to the

framework to partition the graph—i.e., to decide which vertex runs on which

machine, and how to route messages over the network so that they end up in the

right place.

Because the programming model deals with just one vertex at a time (sometimes

called “thinking like a vertex”), the framework may partition the graph in arbitrary

ways. Ideally it would be partitioned such that vertices are colocated on the same

machine if they need to communicate a lot. However, finding such an optimized par‐

titioning is hard—in practice, the graph is often simply partitioned by an arbitrarily

assigned vertex ID, making no attempt to group related vertices together.

As a result, graph algorithms often have a lot of cross-machine communication over‐

head, and the intermediate state (messages sent between nodes) is often bigger than

the original graph. The overhead of sending messages over the network can signifi‐

cantly slow down distributed graph algorithms.

For this reason, if your graph can fit in memory on a single computer, it’s quite likely

that a single-machine (maybe even single-threaded) algorithm will outperform a dis‐

tributed batch process [73, 74]. Even if the graph is bigger than memory, it can fit on the disks of a single computer, single-machine processing using a framework such as GraphChi is a viable option [75]. If the graph is too big to fit on a single machine, a distributed approach such as Pregel is unavoidable; efficiently parallelizing graph algorithms is an area of ongoing research [76].

High-Level APIs and Languages

Over the years since MapReduce first became popular, the execution engines for dis‐

tributed batch processing have matured. By now, the infrastructure has become

robust enough to store and process many petabytes of data on clusters of over 10,000

machines. As the problem of physically operating batch processes at such scale has

been considered more or less solved, attention has turned to other areas: improving

the programming model, improving the efficiency of processing, and broadening the

set of problems that these technologies can solve.

426 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

As discussed previously, higher-level languages and APIs such as Hive, Pig, Cascad‐

ing, and Crunch became popular because programming MapReduce jobs by hand is

quite laborious. As Tez emerged, these high-level languages had the additional bene‐

fit of being able to move to the new dataflow execution engine without the need to

rewrite job code. Spark and Flink also include their own high-level dataflow APIs,

often taking inspiration from FlumeJava [34].

These dataflow APIs generally use relational-style building blocks to express a com‐

putation: joining datasets on the value of some field; grouping tuples by key; filtering

by some condition; and aggregating tuples by counting, summing, or other functions.

Internally, these operations are implemented using the various join and grouping

algorithms that we discussed earlier in this chapter.

Besides the obvious advantage of requiring less code, these high-level interfaces also

allow interactive use, in which you write analysis code incrementally in a shell and

run it frequently to observe what it is doing. This style of development is very helpful

when exploring a dataset and experimenting with approaches for processing it. It is

also reminiscent of the Unix philosophy, which we discussed in “The Unix Philoso‐

phy” on page 394.

Moreover, these high-level interfaces not only make the humans using the system

more productive, but they also improve the job execution efficiency at a machine

level.

The move toward declarative query languages

An advantage of specifying joins as relational operators, compared to spelling out the

code that performs the join, is that the framework can analyze the properties of the

join inputs and automatically decide which of the aforementioned join algorithms

would be most suitable for the task at hand. Hive, Spark, and Flink have cost-based

query optimizers that can do this, and even change the order of joins so that the

amount of intermediate state is minimized [66, 77, 78, 79].

The choice of join algorithm can make a big difference to the performance of a batch

job, and it is nice not to have to understand and remember all the various join algo‐

rithms we discussed in this chapter. This is possible if joins are specified in a declara‐

tive way: the application simply states which joins are required, and the query

optimizer decides how they can best be executed. We previously came across this idea

in “Query Languages for Data” on page 42.

However, in other ways, MapReduce and its dataflow successors are very different

from the fully declarative query model of SQL. MapReduce was built around the idea

of function callbacks: for each record or group of records, a user-defined function

(the mapper or reducer) is called, and that function is free to call arbitrary code in

order to decide what to output. This approach has the advantage that you can draw

Beyond MapReduce | 427

upon a large ecosystem of existing libraries to do things like parsing, natural language

analysis, image analysis, and running numerical or statistical algorithms.

The freedom to easily run arbitrary code is what has long distinguished batch pro‐

cessing systems of MapReduce heritage from MPP databases (see “Comparing

Hadoop to Distributed Databases” on page 414); although databases have facilities

for writing user-defined functions, they are often cumbersome to use and not well

integrated with the package managers and dependency management systems that are

widely used in most programming languages (such as Maven for Java, npm for Java‐

Script, and Rubygems for Ruby).

However, dataflow engines have found that there are also advantages to incorporat‐

ing more declarative features in areas besides joins. For example, if a callback func‐

tion contains only a simple filtering condition, or it just selects some fields from a

record, then there is significant CPU overhead in calling the function on every

record. If such simple filtering and mapping operations are expressed in a declarative

way, the query optimizer can take advantage of column-oriented storage layouts (see

“Column-Oriented Storage” on page 95) and read only the required columns from

disk. Hive, Spark DataFrames, and Impala also use vectorized execution (see “Mem‐

ory bandwidth and vectorized processing” on page 99): iterating over data in a tight

inner loop that is friendly to CPU caches, and avoiding function calls. Spark gener‐

ates JVM bytecode [79] and Impala uses LLVM to generate native code for these

inner loops [41].

By incorporating declarative aspects in their high-level APIs, and having query opti‐

mizers that can take advantage of them during execution, batch processing frame‐

works begin to look more like MPP databases (and can achieve comparable

performance). At the same time, by having the extensibility of being able to run arbi‐

trary code and read data in arbitrary formats, they retain their flexibility advantage.

Specialization for different domains

While the extensibility of being able to run arbitrary code is useful, there are also

many common cases where standard processing patterns keep reoccurring, and so it

is worth having reusable implementations of the common building blocks. Tradition‐

ally, MPP databases have served the needs of business intelligence analysts and busi‐

ness reporting, but that is just one among many domains in which batch processing

is used.

Another domain of increasing importance is statistical and numerical algorithms,

which are needed for machine learning applications such as classification and recom‐

mendation systems. Reusable implementations are emerging: for example, Mahout

implements various algorithms for machine learning on top of MapReduce, Spark,

and Flink, while MADlib implements similar functionality inside a relational MPP

database (Apache HAWQ) [54].

428 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

Also useful are spatial algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors [80], which searches for

items that are close to a given item in some multi-dimensional space—a kind of simi‐

larity search. Approximate search is also important for genome analysis algorithms,

which need to find strings that are similar but not identical [81].

Batch processing engines are being used for distributed execution of algorithms from

an increasingly wide range of domains. As batch processing systems gain built-in

functionality and high-level declarative operators, and as MPP databases become

more programmable and flexible, the two are beginning to look more alike: in the

end, they are all just systems for storing and processing data.

Summary

In this chapter we explored the topic of batch processing. We started by looking at

Unix tools such as awk, grep, and sort, and we saw how the design philosophy of

those tools is carried forward into MapReduce and more recent dataflow engines.

Some of those design principles are that inputs are immutable, outputs are intended

to become the input to another (as yet unknown) program, and complex problems

are solved by composing small tools that “do one thing well.”

In the Unix world, the uniform interface that allows one program to be composed

with another is files and pipes; in MapReduce, that interface is a distributed filesys‐

tem. We saw that dataflow engines add their own pipe-like data transport mecha‐

nisms to avoid materializing intermediate state to the distributed filesystem, but the

initial input and final output of a job is still usually HDFS.

The two main problems that distributed batch processing frameworks need to solve

are:

Partitioning

In MapReduce, mappers are partitioned according to input file blocks. The out‐

put of mappers is repartitioned, sorted, and merged into a configurable number

of reducer partitions. The purpose of this process is to bring all the related data—

e.g., all the records with the same key—together in the same place.

Post-MapReduce dataflow engines try to avoid sorting unless it is required, but

they otherwise take a broadly similar approach to partitioning.

Fault tolerance

MapReduce frequently writes to disk, which makes it easy to recover from an

individual failed task without restarting the entire job but slows down execution

in the failure-free case. Dataflow engines perform less materialization of inter‐

mediate state and keep more in memory, which means that they need to recom‐

pute more data if a node fails. Deterministic operators reduce the amount of data

that needs to be recomputed.

Summary | 429

We discussed several join algorithms for MapReduce, most of which are also inter‐

nally used in MPP databases and dataflow engines. They also provide a good illustra‐

tion of how partitioned algorithms work:

Sort-merge joins

Each of the inputs being joined goes through a mapper that extracts the join key.

By partitioning, sorting, and merging, all the records with the same key end up

going to the same call of the reducer. This function can then output the joined

records.

Broadcast hash joins

One of the two join inputs is small, so it is not partitioned and it can be entirely

loaded into a hash table. Thus, you can start a mapper for each partition of the

large join input, load the hash table for the small input into each mapper, and

then scan over the large input one record at a time, querying the hash table for

each record.

Partitioned hash joins

If the two join inputs are partitioned in the same way (using the same key, same

hash function, and same number of partitions), then the hash table approach can

be used independently for each partition.

Distributed batch processing engines have a deliberately restricted programming

model: callback functions (such as mappers and reducers) are assumed to be stateless

and to have no externally visible side effects besides their designated output. This

restriction allows the framework to hide some of the hard distributed systems prob‐

lems behind its abstraction: in the face of crashes and network issues, tasks can be

retried safely, and the output from any failed tasks is discarded. If several tasks for a

partition succeed, only one of them actually makes its output visible.

Thanks to the framework, your code in a batch processing job does not need to worry

about implementing fault-tolerance mechanisms: the framework can guarantee that

the final output of a job is the same as if no faults had occurred, even though in real‐

ity various tasks perhaps had to be retried. These reliable semantics are much stron‐

ger than what you usually have in online services that handle user requests and that

write to databases as a side effect of processing a request.

The distinguishing feature of a batch processing job is that it reads some input data

and produces some output data, without modifying the input—in other words, the

output is derived from the input. Crucially, the input data is bounded: it has a known,

fixed size (for example, it consists of a set of log files at some point in time, or a snap‐

shot of a database’s contents). Because it is bounded, a job knows when it has finished

reading the entire input, and so a job eventually completes when it is done.

In the next chapter, we will turn to stream processing, in which the input is unboun‐

ded—that is, you still have a job, but its inputs are never-ending streams of data. In

430 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

this case, a job is never complete, because at any time there may still be more work

coming in. We shall see that stream and batch processing are similar in some

respects, but the assumption of unbounded streams also changes a lot about how we

build systems.

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436 | Chapter 10: Batch Processing

CHAPTER 11

Stream Processing

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that

works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from

scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

—John Gall, Systemantics (1975)

In Chapter 10 we discussed batch processing—techniques that read a set of files as

input and produce a new set of output files. The output is a form of derived data; that

is, a dataset that can be recreated by running the batch process again if necessary. We

saw how this simple but powerful idea can be used to create search indexes, recom‐

mendation systems, analytics, and more.

However, one big assumption remained throughout Chapter 10: namely, that the

input is bounded—i.e., of a known and finite size—so the batch process knows when

it has finished reading its input. For example, the sorting operation that is central to

MapReduce must read its entire input before it can start producing output: it could

happen that the very last input record is the one with the lowest key, and thus needs

to be the very first output record, so starting the output early is not an option.

In reality, a lot of data is unbounded because it arrives gradually over time: your users

produced data yesterday and today, and they will continue to produce more data

tomorrow. Unless you go out of business, this process never ends, and so the dataset

is never “complete” in any meaningful way [1]. Thus, batch processors must artifi‐

cially divide the data into chunks of fixed duration: for example, processing a day’s

worth of data at the end of every day, or processing an hour’s worth of data at the end

of every hour.

The problem with daily batch processes is that changes in the input are only reflected

in the output a day later, which is too slow for many impatient users. To reduce the

delay, we can run the processing more frequently—say, processing a second’s worth

of data at the end of every second—or even continuously, abandoning the fixed time

439

slices entirely and simply processing every event as it happens. That is the idea

behind stream processing.

In general, a “stream” refers to data that is incrementally made available over time.

The concept appears in many places: in the stdin and stdout of Unix, programming

languages (lazy lists) [2], filesystem APIs (such as Java’s FileInputStream), TCP con‐

nections, delivering audio and video over the internet, and so on.

In this chapter we will look at event streams as a data management mechanism: the

unbounded, incrementally processed counterpart to the batch data we saw in the

last chapter. We will first discuss how streams are represented, stored, and transmit‐

ted over a network. In “Databases and Streams” on page 451 we will investigate

the relationship between streams and databases. And finally, in “Processing Streams”

on page 464 we will explore approaches and tools for processing those streams

continually, and ways that they can be used to build applications.

Transmitting Event Streams

In the batch processing world, the inputs and outputs of a job are files (perhaps on a

distributed filesystem). What does the streaming equivalent look like?

When the input is a file (a sequence of bytes), the first processing step is usually to

parse it into a sequence of records. In a stream processing context, a record is more

commonly known as an event, but it is essentially the same thing: a small, self-

contained, immutable object containing the details of something that happened at

some point in time. An event usually contains a timestamp indicating when it hap‐

pened according to a time-of-day clock (see “Monotonic Versus Time-of-Day

Clocks” on page 288).

For example, the thing that happened might be an action that a user took, such as

viewing a page or making a purchase. It might also originate from a machine, such as

a periodic measurement from a temperature sensor, or a CPU utilization metric. In

the example of “Batch Processing with Unix Tools” on page 391, each line of the web

server log is an event.

An event may be encoded as a text string, or JSON, or perhaps in some binary form,

as discussed in Chapter 4. This encoding allows you to store an event, for example by

appending it to a file, inserting it into a relational table, or writing it to a document

database. It also allows you to send the event over the network to another node in

order to process it.

In batch processing, a file is written once and then potentially read by multiple jobs.

Analogously, in streaming terminology, an event is generated once by a producer

(also known as a publisher or sender), and then potentially processed by multiple con‐

sumers ( subscribers or recipients) [3]. In a filesystem, a filename identifies a set of 440 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing related records; in a streaming system, related events are usually grouped together

into a topic or stream.

In principle, a file or database is sufficient to connect producers and consumers: a

producer writes every event that it generates to the datastore, and each consumer

periodically polls the datastore to check for events that have appeared since it last ran.

This is essentially what a batch process does when it processes a day’s worth of data at

the end of every day.

However, when moving toward continual processing with low delays, polling

becomes expensive if the datastore is not designed for this kind of usage. The more

often you poll, the lower the percentage of requests that return new events, and thus

the higher the overheads become. Instead, it is better for consumers to be notified

when new events appear.

Databases have traditionally not supported this kind of notification mechanism very

well: relational databases commonly have triggers, which can react to a change (e.g., a

row being inserted into a table), but they are very limited in what they can do and

have been somewhat of an afterthought in database design [4, 5]. Instead, specialized tools have been developed for the purpose of delivering event notifications.

Messaging Systems

A common approach for notifying consumers about new events is to use a messaging

system: a producer sends a message containing the event, which is then pushed to

consumers. We touched on these systems previously in “Message-Passing Dataflow”

on page 136, but we will now go into more detail.

A direct communication channel like a Unix pipe or TCP connection between pro‐

ducer and consumer would be a simple way of implementing a messaging system.

However, most messaging systems expand on this basic model. In particular, Unix

pipes and TCP connect exactly one sender with one recipient, whereas a messaging

system allows multiple producer nodes to send messages to the same topic and allows

multiple consumer nodes to receive messages in a topic.

Within this publish/subscribe model, different systems take a wide range of

approaches, and there is no one right answer for all purposes. To differentiate the

systems, it is particularly helpful to ask the following two questions:

1. What happens if the producers send messages faster than the consumers can pro‐

cess them? Broadly speaking, there are three options: the system can drop mes‐

sages, buffer messages in a queue, or apply backpressure (also known as flow

control; i.e., blocking the producer from sending more messages). For example,

Unix pipes and TCP use backpressure: they have a small fixed-size buffer, and if

Transmitting Event Streams | 441

it fills up, the sender is blocked until the recipient takes data out of the buffer (see

“Network congestion and queueing” on page 282).

If messages are buffered in a queue, it is important to understand what happens

as that queue grows. Does the system crash if the queue no longer fits in mem‐

ory, or does it write messages to disk? If so, how does the disk access affect the

performance of the messaging system [6]?

2. What happens if nodes crash or temporarily go offline—are any messages lost? As

with databases, durability may require some combination of writing to disk

and/or replication (see the sidebar “Replication and Durability” on page 227),

which has a cost. If you can afford to sometimes lose messages, you can probably

get higher throughput and lower latency on the same hardware.

Whether message loss is acceptable depends very much on the application. For exam‐

ple, with sensor readings and metrics that are transmitted periodically, an occasional

missing data point is perhaps not important, since an updated value will be sent a

short time later anyway. However, beware that if a large number of messages are

dropped, it may not be immediately apparent that the metrics are incorrect [7]. If you

are counting events, it is more important that they are delivered reliably, since every

lost message means incorrect counters.

A nice property of the batch processing systems we explored in Chapter 10 is that

they provide a strong reliability guarantee: failed tasks are automatically retried, and

partial output from failed tasks is automatically discarded. This means the output is

the same as if no failures had occurred, which helps simplify the programming

model. Later in this chapter we will examine how we can provide similar guarantees

in a streaming context.

Direct messaging from producers to consumers

A number of messaging systems use direct network communication between produc‐

ers and consumers without going via intermediary nodes:

• UDP multicast is widely used in the financial industry for streams such as stock

market feeds, where low latency is important [8]. Although UDP itself is unrelia‐

ble, application-level protocols can recover lost packets (the producer must

remember packets it has sent so that it can retransmit them on demand).

• Brokerless messaging libraries such as ZeroMQ [9] and nanomsg take a similar

approach, implementing publish/subscribe messaging over TCP or IP multicast.

• StatsD [10] and Brubeck [7] use unreliable UDP messaging for collecting metrics

from all machines on the network and monitoring them. (In the StatsD protocol,

counter metrics are only correct if all messages are received; using UDP makes

the metrics at best approximate [11]. See also “TCP Versus UDP” on page 283.) 442 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing • If the consumer exposes a service on the network, producers can make a direct

HTTP or RPC request (see “Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC” on page

131) to push messages to the consumer. This is the idea behind webhooks [12], a pattern in which a callback URL of one service is registered with another service, and it makes a request to that URL whenever an event occurs.

Although these direct messaging systems work well in the situations for which they

are designed, they generally require the application code to be aware of the possibility

of message loss. The faults they can tolerate are quite limited: even if the protocols

detect and retransmit packets that are lost in the network, they generally assume that

producers and consumers are constantly online.

If a consumer is offline, it may miss messages that were sent while it is unreachable.

Some protocols allow the producer to retry failed message deliveries, but this

approach may break down if the producer crashes, losing the buffer of messages that

it was supposed to retry.

Message brokers

A widely used alternative is to send messages via a message broker (also known as a

message queue), which is essentially a kind of database that is optimized for handling

message streams [13]. It runs as a server, with producers and consumers connecting

to it as clients. Producers write messages to the broker, and consumers receive them

by reading them from the broker.

By centralizing the data in the broker, these systems can more easily tolerate clients

that come and go (connect, disconnect, and crash), and the question of durability is

moved to the broker instead. Some message brokers only keep messages in memory,

while others (depending on configuration) write them to disk so that they are not lost

in case of a broker crash. Faced with slow consumers, they generally allow unboun‐

ded queueing (as opposed to dropping messages or backpressure), although this

choice may also depend on the configuration.

A consequence of queueing is also that consumers are generally asynchronous: when

a producer sends a message, it normally only waits for the broker to confirm that it

has buffered the message and does not wait for the message to be processed by con‐

sumers. The delivery to consumers will happen at some undetermined future point in

time—often within a fraction of a second, but sometimes significantly later if there is

a queue backlog.

Message brokers compared to databases

Some message brokers can even participate in two-phase commit protocols using XA

or JTA (see “Distributed Transactions in Practice” on page 360). This feature makes

Transmitting Event Streams | 443

them quite similar in nature to databases, although there are still important practical

differences between message brokers and databases:

• Databases usually keep data until it is explicitly deleted, whereas most message

brokers automatically delete a message when it has been successfully delivered to

its consumers. Such message brokers are not suitable for long-term data storage.

• Since they quickly delete messages, most message brokers assume that their

working set is fairly small—i.e., the queues are short. If the broker needs to buffer

a lot of messages because the consumers are slow (perhaps spilling messages to

disk if they no longer fit in memory), each individual message takes longer to

process, and the overall throughput may degrade [6].

• Databases often support secondary indexes and various ways of searching for

data, while message brokers often support some way of subscribing to a subset of

topics matching some pattern. The mechanisms are different, but both are essen‐

tially ways for a client to select the portion of the data that it wants to know

about.

• When querying a database, the result is typically based on a point-in-time snap‐

shot of the data; if another client subsequently writes something to the database

that changes the query result, the first client does not find out that its prior result

is now outdated (unless it repeats the query, or polls for changes). By contrast,

message brokers do not support arbitrary queries, but they do notify clients when

data changes (i.e., when new messages become available).

This is the traditional view of message brokers, which is encapsulated in standards

like JMS [14] and AMQP [15] and implemented in software like RabbitMQ,

ActiveMQ, HornetQ, Qpid, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, IBM MQ, Azure Ser‐

vice Bus, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub [16].

Multiple consumers

When multiple consumers read messages in the same topic, two main patterns of

messaging are used, as illustrated in Figure 11-1:

Load balancing

Each message is delivered to one of the consumers, so the consumers can share

the work of processing the messages in the topic. The broker may assign mes‐

sages to consumers arbitrarily. This pattern is useful when the messages are

expensive to process, and so you want to be able to add consumers to parallelize

the processing. (In AMQP, you can implement load balancing by having multi‐

ple clients consuming from the same queue, and in JMS it is called a shared

subscription.)

444 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Fan-out

Each message is delivered to all of the consumers. Fan-out allows several inde‐

pendent consumers to each “tune in” to the same broadcast of messages, without

affecting each other—the streaming equivalent of having several different batch

jobs that read the same input file. (This feature is provided by topic subscriptions

in JMS, and exchange bindings in AMQP.)

Figure 11-1. (a) Load balancing: sharing the work of consuming a topic among con‐

sumers; (b) fan-out: delivering each message to multiple consumers.

The two patterns can be combined: for example, two separate groups of consumers

may each subscribe to a topic, such that each group collectively receives all messages,

but within each group only one of the nodes receives each message.

Acknowledgments and redelivery

Consumers may crash at any time, so it could happen that a broker delivers a mes‐

sage to a consumer but the consumer never processes it, or only partially processes it

before crashing. In order to ensure that the message is not lost, message brokers use

acknowledgments: a client must explicitly tell the broker when it has finished process‐

ing a message so that the broker can remove it from the queue.

If the connection to a client is closed or times out without the broker receiving an

acknowledgment, it assumes that the message was not processed, and therefore it

delivers the message again to another consumer. (Note that it could happen that the

message actually was fully processed, but the acknowledgment was lost in the net‐

work. Handling this case requires an atomic commit protocol, as discussed in “Dis‐

tributed Transactions in Practice” on page 360.)

Transmitting Event Streams | 445

When combined with load balancing, this redelivery behavior has an interesting

effect on the ordering of messages. In Figure 11-2, the consumers generally process

messages in the order they were sent by producers. However, consumer 2 crashes

while processing message m3, at the same time as consumer 1 is processing message

m4. The unacknowledged message m3 is subsequently redelivered to consumer 1,

with the result that consumer 1 processes messages in the order m4, m3, m5. Thus,

m3 and m4 are not delivered in the same order as they were sent by producer 1.

Figure 11-2. Consumer 2 crashes while processing m3, so it is redelivered to consumer 1

at a later time.

Even if the message broker otherwise tries to preserve the order of messages (as

required by both the JMS and AMQP standards), the combination of load balancing

with redelivery inevitably leads to messages being reordered. To avoid this issue, you

can use a separate queue per consumer (i.e., not use the load balancing feature). Mes‐

sage reordering is not a problem if messages are completely independent of each

other, but it can be important if there are causal dependencies between messages, as

we shall see later in the chapter.

Partitioned Logs

Sending a packet over a network or making a request to a network service is normally

a transient operation that leaves no permanent trace. Although it is possible to record

it permanently (using packet capture and logging), we normally don’t think of it that

way. Even message brokers that durably write messages to disk quickly delete them

again after they have been delivered to consumers, because they are built around a

transient messaging mindset.

446 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Databases and filesystems take the opposite approach: everything that is written to a

database or file is normally expected to be permanently recorded, at least until some‐

one explicitly chooses to delete it again.

This difference in mindset has a big impact on how derived data is created. A key

feature of batch processes, as discussed in Chapter 10, is that you can run them

repeatedly, experimenting with the processing steps, without risk of damaging the

input (since the input is read-only). This is not the case with AMQP/JMS-style mes‐

saging: receiving a message is destructive if the acknowledgment causes it to be

deleted from the broker, so you cannot run the same consumer again and expect to

get the same result.

If you add a new consumer to a messaging system, it typically only starts receiving

messages sent after the time it was registered; any prior messages are already gone

and cannot be recovered. Contrast this with files and databases, where you can add a

new client at any time, and it can read data written arbitrarily far in the past (as long

as it has not been explicitly overwritten or deleted by the application).

Why can we not have a hybrid, combining the durable storage approach of databases

with the low-latency notification facilities of messaging? This is the idea behind log-

based message brokers.

Using logs for message storage

A log is simply an append-only sequence of records on disk. We previously discussed

logs in the context of log-structured storage engines and write-ahead logs in Chap‐

ter 3, and in the context of replication in Chapter 5.

The same structure can be used to implement a message broker: a producer sends a

message by appending it to the end of the log, and a consumer receives messages by

reading the log sequentially. If a consumer reaches the end of the log, it waits for a

notification that a new message has been appended. The Unix tool tail -f, which

watches a file for data being appended, essentially works like this.

In order to scale to higher throughput than a single disk can offer, the log can be

partitioned (in the sense of Chapter 6). Different partitions can then be hosted on different machines, making each partition a separate log that can be read and written independently from other partitions. A topic can then be defined as a group of parti‐

tions that all carry messages of the same type. This approach is illustrated in

Figure 11-3.

Within each partition, the broker assigns a monotonically increasing sequence num‐

ber, or offset, to every message (in Figure 11-3, the numbers in boxes are message offsets). Such a sequence number makes sense because a partition is append-only, so the messages within a partition are totally ordered. There is no ordering guarantee across

different partitions.

Transmitting Event Streams | 447

Figure 11-3. Producers send messages by appending them to a topic-partition file, and

consumers read these files sequentially.

Apache Kafka [17, 18], Amazon Kinesis Streams [19], and Twitter’s DistributedLog

[20, 21] are log-based message brokers that work like this. Google Cloud Pub/Sub is

architecturally similar but exposes a JMS-style API rather than a log abstraction [16].

Even though these message brokers write all messages to disk, they are able to achieve

throughput of millions of messages per second by partitioning across multiple

machines, and fault tolerance by replicating messages [22, 23].

Logs compared to traditional messaging

The log-based approach trivially supports fan-out messaging, because several con‐

sumers can independently read the log without affecting each other—reading a mes‐

sage does not delete it from the log. To achieve load balancing across a group of

consumers, instead of assigning individual messages to consumer clients, the broker

can assign entire partitions to nodes in the consumer group.

Each client then consumes all the messages in the partitions it has been assigned.

Typically, when a consumer has been assigned a log partition, it reads the messages in

the partition sequentially, in a straightforward single-threaded manner. This coarse-

grained load balancing approach has some downsides:

448 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

• The number of nodes sharing the work of consuming a topic can be at most the

number of log partitions in that topic, because messages within the same parti‐

tion are delivered to the same node.i

• If a single message is slow to process, it holds up the processing of subsequent

messages in that partition (a form of head-of-line blocking; see “Describing Per‐

formance” on page 13).

Thus, in situations where messages may be expensive to process and you want to par‐

allelize processing on a message-by-message basis, and where message ordering is not

so important, the JMS/AMQP style of message broker is preferable. On the other

hand, in situations with high message throughput, where each message is fast to pro‐

cess and where message ordering is important, the log-based approach works very

well.

Consumer offsets

Consuming a partition sequentially makes it easy to tell which messages have been

processed: all messages with an offset less than a consumer’s current offset have

already been processed, and all messages with a greater offset have not yet been seen.

Thus, the broker does not need to track acknowledgments for every single message—

it only needs to periodically record the consumer offsets. The reduced bookkeeping

overhead and the opportunities for batching and pipelining in this approach help

increase the throughput of log-based systems.

This offset is in fact very similar to the log sequence number that is commonly found

in single-leader database replication, and which we discussed in “Setting Up New

Followers” on page 155. In database replication, the log sequence number allows a

follower to reconnect to a leader after it has become disconnected, and resume repli‐

cation without skipping any writes. Exactly the same principle is used here: the mes‐

sage broker behaves like a leader database, and the consumer like a follower.

If a consumer node fails, another node in the consumer group is assigned the failed

consumer’s partitions, and it starts consuming messages at the last recorded offset. If

the consumer had processed subsequent messages but not yet recorded their offset,

those messages will be processed a second time upon restart. We will discuss ways of

dealing with this issue later in the chapter.

i. It’s possible to create a load balancing scheme in which two consumers share the work of processing a partition by having both read the full set of messages, but one of them only considers messages with even-numbered offsets while the other deals with the odd-numbered offsets. Alternatively, you could spread message processing over a thread pool, but that approach complicates consumer offset management. In gen‐

eral, single-threaded processing of a partition is preferable, and parallelism can be increased by using more partitions.

Transmitting Event Streams | 449

Disk space usage

If you only ever append to the log, you will eventually run out of disk space. To

reclaim disk space, the log is actually divided into segments, and from time to time

old segments are deleted or moved to archive storage. (We’ll discuss a more sophisti‐

cated way of freeing disk space later.)

This means that if a slow consumer cannot keep up with the rate of messages, and it

falls so far behind that its consumer offset points to a deleted segment, it will miss

some of the messages. Effectively, the log implements a bounded-size buffer that dis‐

cards old messages when it gets full, also known as a circular buffer or ring buffer.

However, since that buffer is on disk, it can be quite large.

Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. At the time of writing, a typical large

hard drive has a capacity of 6 TB and a sequential write throughput of 150 MB/s. If

you are writing messages at the fastest possible rate, it takes about 11 hours to fill the

drive. Thus, the disk can buffer 11 hours’ worth of messages, after which it will start

overwriting old messages. This ratio remains the same, even if you use many hard

drives and machines. In practice, deployments rarely use the full write bandwidth of

the disk, so the log can typically keep a buffer of several days’ or even weeks’ worth of

messages.

Regardless of how long you retain messages, the throughput of a log remains more or

less constant, since every message is written to disk anyway [18]. This behavior is in

contrast to messaging systems that keep messages in memory by default and only

write them to disk if the queue grows too large: such systems are fast when queues are

short and become much slower when they start writing to disk, so the throughput

depends on the amount of history retained.

When consumers cannot keep up with producers

At the beginning of “Messaging Systems” on page 441 we discussed three choices of

what to do if a consumer cannot keep up with the rate at which producers are send‐

ing messages: dropping messages, buffering, or applying backpressure. In this taxon‐

omy, the log-based approach is a form of buffering with a large but fixed-size buffer

(limited by the available disk space).

If a consumer falls so far behind that the messages it requires are older than what is

retained on disk, it will not be able to read those messages—so the broker effectively

drops old messages that go back further than the size of the buffer can accommodate.

You can monitor how far a consumer is behind the head of the log, and raise an alert

if it falls behind significantly. As the buffer is large, there is enough time for a human

operator to fix the slow consumer and allow it to catch up before it starts missing

messages.

450 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Even if a consumer does fall too far behind and starts missing messages, only that

consumer is affected; it does not disrupt the service for other consumers. This fact is

a big operational advantage: you can experimentally consume a production log for

development, testing, or debugging purposes, without having to worry much about

disrupting production services. When a consumer is shut down or crashes, it stops

consuming resources—the only thing that remains is its consumer offset.

This behavior also contrasts with traditional message brokers, where you need to be

careful to delete any queues whose consumers have been shut down—otherwise they

continue unnecessarily accumulating messages and taking away memory from con‐

sumers that are still active.

Replaying old messages

We noted previously that with AMQP- and JMS-style message brokers, processing

and acknowledging messages is a destructive operation, since it causes the messages

to be deleted on the broker. On the other hand, in a log-based message broker, con‐

suming messages is more like reading from a file: it is a read-only operation that does

not change the log.

The only side effect of processing, besides any output of the consumer, is that the

consumer offset moves forward. But the offset is under the consumer’s control, so it

can easily be manipulated if necessary: for example, you can start a copy of a con‐

sumer with yesterday’s offsets and write the output to a different location, in order to

reprocess the last day’s worth of messages. You can repeat this any number of times,

varying the processing code.

This aspect makes log-based messaging more like the batch processes of the last

chapter, where derived data is clearly separated from input data through a repeatable

transformation process. It allows more experimentation and easier recovery from

errors and bugs, making it a good tool for integrating dataflows within an organiza‐

tion [24].

Databases and Streams

We have drawn some comparisons between message brokers and databases. Even

though they have traditionally been considered separate categories of tools, we saw

that log-based message brokers have been successful in taking ideas from databases

and applying them to messaging. We can also go in reverse: take ideas from messag‐

ing and streams, and apply them to databases.

We said previously that an event is a record of something that happened at some

point in time. The thing that happened may be a user action (e.g., typing a search

query), or a sensor reading, but it may also be a write to a database. The fact that

something was written to a database is an event that can be captured, stored, and pro‐

Databases and Streams | 451

cessed. This observation suggests that the connection between databases and streams

runs deeper than just the physical storage of logs on disk—it is quite fundamental.

In fact, a replication log (see “Implementation of Replication Logs” on page 158) is a

stream of database write events, produced by the leader as it processes transactions.

The followers apply that stream of writes to their own copy of the database and thus

end up with an accurate copy of the same data. The events in the replication log

describe the data changes that occurred.

We also came across the state machine replication principle in “Total Order Broad‐

cast” on page 348, which states: if every event represents a write to the database, and every replica processes the same events in the same order, then the replicas will all end up in the same final state. (Processing an event is assumed to be a deterministic

operation.) It’s just another case of event streams!

In this section we will first look at a problem that arises in heterogeneous data sys‐

tems, and then explore how we can solve it by bringing ideas from event streams to

databases.

Keeping Systems in Sync

As we have seen throughout this book, there is no single system that can satisfy all

data storage, querying, and processing needs. In practice, most nontrivial applica‐

tions need to combine several different technologies in order to satisfy their require‐

ments: for example, using an OLTP database to serve user requests, a cache to speed

up common requests, a full-text index to handle search queries, and a data warehouse

for analytics. Each of these has its own copy of the data, stored in its own representa‐

tion that is optimized for its own purposes.

As the same or related data appears in several different places, they need to be kept in

sync with one another: if an item is updated in the database, it also needs to be upda‐

ted in the cache, search indexes, and data warehouse. With data warehouses this syn‐

chronization is usually performed by ETL processes (see “Data Warehousing” on

page 91), often by taking a full copy of a database, transforming it, and bulk-loading

it into the data warehouse—in other words, a batch process. Similarly, we saw in

“The Output of Batch Workflows” on page 411 how search indexes, recommendation

systems, and other derived data systems might be created using batch processes.

If periodic full database dumps are too slow, an alternative that is sometimes used is

dual writes, in which the application code explicitly writes to each of the systems

when data changes: for example, first writing to the database, then updating the

search index, then invalidating the cache entries (or even performing those writes

concurrently).

However, dual writes have some serious problems, one of which is a race condition

illustrated in Figure 11-4. In this example, two clients concurrently want to update an

452 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

item X: client 1 wants to set the value to A, and client 2 wants to set it to B. Both

clients first write the new value to the database, then write it to the search index. Due

to unlucky timing, the requests are interleaved: the database first sees the write from

client 1 setting the value to A, then the write from client 2 setting the value to B, so

the final value in the database is B. The search index first sees the write from client 2,

then client 1, so the final value in the search index is A. The two systems are now

permanently inconsistent with each other, even though no error occurred.

Figure 11-4. In the database, X is first set to A and then to B, while at the search index

the writes arrive in the opposite order.

Unless you have some additional concurrency detection mechanism, such as the ver‐

sion vectors we discussed in “Detecting Concurrent Writes” on page 184, you will not

even notice that concurrent writes occurred—one value will simply silently overwrite

another value.

Another problem with dual writes is that one of the writes may fail while the other

succeeds. This is a fault-tolerance problem rather than a concurrency problem, but it

also has the effect of the two systems becoming inconsistent with each other. Ensur‐

ing that they either both succeed or both fail is a case of the atomic commit problem,

which is expensive to solve (see “Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)” on

page 354).

If you only have one replicated database with a single leader, then that leader deter‐

mines the order of writes, so the state machine replication approach works among

replicas of the database. However, in Figure 11-4 there isn’t a single leader: the database may have a leader and the search index may have a leader, but neither follows the other, and so conflicts can occur (see “Multi-Leader Replication” on page 168).

The situation would be better if there really was only one leader—for example, the

database—and if we could make the search index a follower of the database. But is

this possible in practice?

Databases and Streams | 453

Change Data Capture

The problem with most databases’ replication logs is that they have long been consid‐

ered to be an internal implementation detail of the database, not a public API. Clients

are supposed to query the database through its data model and query language, not

parse the replication logs and try to extract data from them.

For decades, many databases simply did not have a documented way of getting the

log of changes written to them. For this reason it was difficult to take all the changes

made in a database and replicate them to a different storage technology such as a

search index, cache, or data warehouse.

More recently, there has been growing interest in change data capture (CDC), which

is the process of observing all data changes written to a database and extracting them

in a form in which they can be replicated to other systems. CDC is especially interest‐

ing if changes are made available as a stream, immediately as they are written.

For example, you can capture the changes in a database and continually apply the

same changes to a search index. If the log of changes is applied in the same order, you

can expect the data in the search index to match the data in the database. The search

index and any other derived data systems are just consumers of the change stream, as

illustrated in Figure 11-5.

Figure 11-5. Taking data in the order it was written to one database, and applying the

changes to other systems in the same order.

Implementing change data capture

We can call the log consumers derived data systems, as discussed in the introduction

to Part III: the data stored in the search index and the data warehouse is just another

view onto the data in the system of record. Change data capture is a mechanism for

ensuring that all changes made to the system of record are also reflected in the

derived data systems so that the derived systems have an accurate copy of the data.

454 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Essentially, change data capture makes one database the leader (the one from which

the changes are captured), and turns the others into followers. A log-based message

broker is well suited for transporting the change events from the source database,

since it preserves the ordering of messages (avoiding the reordering issue of

Figure 11-2).

Database triggers can be used to implement change data capture (see “Trigger-based

replication” on page 161) by registering triggers that observe all changes to data

tables and add corresponding entries to a changelog table. However, they tend to be

fragile and have significant performance overheads. Parsing the replication log can be

a more robust approach, although it also comes with challenges, such as handling

schema changes.

LinkedIn’s Databus [25], Facebook’s Wormhole [26], and Yahoo!’s Sherpa [27] use

this idea at large scale. Bottled Water implements CDC for PostgreSQL using an API

that decodes the write-ahead log [28], Maxwell and Debezium do something similar

for MySQL by parsing the binlog [29, 30, 31], Mongoriver reads the MongoDB oplog

[32, 33], and GoldenGate provides similar facilities for Oracle [34, 35].

Like message brokers, change data capture is usually asynchronous: the system of

record database does not wait for the change to be applied to consumers before com‐

mitting it. This design has the operational advantage that adding a slow consumer

does not affect the system of record too much, but it has the downside that all the

issues of replication lag apply (see “Problems with Replication Lag” on page 161).

Initial snapshot

If you have the log of all changes that were ever made to a database, you can recon‐

struct the entire state of the database by replaying the log. However, in many cases,

keeping all changes forever would require too much disk space, and replaying it

would take too long, so the log needs to be truncated.

Building a new full-text index, for example, requires a full copy of the entire database

—it is not sufficient to only apply a log of recent changes, since it would be missing

items that were not recently updated. Thus, if you don’t have the entire log history,

you need to start with a consistent snapshot, as previously discussed in “Setting Up

New Followers” on page 155.

The snapshot of the database must correspond to a known position or offset in the

change log, so that you know at which point to start applying changes after the snap‐

shot has been processed. Some CDC tools integrate this snapshot facility, while oth‐

ers leave it as a manual operation.

Databases and Streams | 455

Log compaction

If you can only keep a limited amount of log history, you need to go through the

snapshot process every time you want to add a new derived data system. However,

log compaction provides a good alternative.

We discussed log compaction previously in “Hash Indexes” on page 72, in the con‐

text of log-structured storage engines (see Figure 3-2 for an example). The principle

is simple: the storage engine periodically looks for log records with the same key,

throws away any duplicates, and keeps only the most recent update for each key. This

compaction and merging process runs in the background.

In a log-structured storage engine, an update with a special null value (a tombstone)

indicates that a key was deleted, and causes it to be removed during log compaction.

But as long as a key is not overwritten or deleted, it stays in the log forever. The disk

space required for such a compacted log depends only on the current contents of the

database, not the number of writes that have ever occurred in the database. If the

same key is frequently overwritten, previous values will eventually be garbage-

collected, and only the latest value will be retained.

The same idea works in the context of log-based message brokers and change data

capture. If the CDC system is set up such that every change has a primary key, and

every update for a key replaces the previous value for that key, then it’s sufficient to

keep just the most recent write for a particular key.

Now, whenever you want to rebuild a derived data system such as a search index, you

can start a new consumer from offset 0 of the log-compacted topic, and sequentially

scan over all messages in the log. The log is guaranteed to contain the most recent

value for every key in the database (and maybe some older values)—in other words,

you can use it to obtain a full copy of the database contents without having to take

another snapshot of the CDC source database.

This log compaction feature is supported by Apache Kafka. As we shall see later in

this chapter, it allows the message broker to be used for durable storage, not just for

transient messaging.

API support for change streams

Increasingly, databases are beginning to support change streams as a first-class inter‐

face, rather than the typical retrofitted and reverse-engineered CDC efforts. For

example, RethinkDB allows queries to subscribe to notifications when the results of a

query change [36], Firebase [37] and CouchDB [38] provide data synchronization

based on a change feed that is also made available to applications, and Meteor uses

the MongoDB oplog to subscribe to data changes and update the user interface [39].

VoltDB allows transactions to continuously export data from a database in the form

of a stream [40]. The database represents an output stream in the relational data

456 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

model as a table into which transactions can insert tuples, but which cannot be quer‐

ied. The stream then consists of the log of tuples that committed transactions have

written to this special table, in the order they were committed. External consumers

can asynchronously consume this log and use it to update derived data systems.

Kafka Connect [41] is an effort to integrate change data capture tools for a wide

range of database systems with Kafka. Once the stream of change events is in Kafka, it

can be used to update derived data systems such as search indexes, and also feed into

stream processing systems as discussed later in this chapter.

Event Sourcing

There are some parallels between the ideas we’ve discussed here and event sourcing, a

technique that was developed in the domain-driven design (DDD) community [42,

43, 44]. We will discuss event sourcing briefly, because it incorporates some useful and relevant ideas for streaming systems.

Similarly to change data capture, event sourcing involves storing all changes to the

application state as a log of change events. The biggest difference is that event sourc‐

ing applies the idea at a different level of abstraction:

• In change data capture, the application uses the database in a mutable way,

updating and deleting records at will. The log of changes is extracted from the

database at a low level (e.g., by parsing the replication log), which ensures that

the order of writes extracted from the database matches the order in which they

were actually written, avoiding the race condition in Figure 11-4. The application

writing to the database does not need to be aware that CDC is occurring.

• In event sourcing, the application logic is explicitly built on the basis of immuta‐

ble events that are written to an event log. In this case, the event store is append-

only, and updates or deletes are discouraged or prohibited. Events are designed

to reflect things that happened at the application level, rather than low-level state

changes.

Event sourcing is a powerful technique for data modeling: from an application point

of view it is more meaningful to record the user’s actions as immutable events, rather

than recording the effect of those actions on a mutable database. Event sourcing

makes it easier to evolve applications over time, helps with debugging by making it

easier to understand after the fact why something happened, and guards against

application bugs (see “Advantages of immutable events” on page 460).

For example, storing the event “student cancelled their course enrollment” clearly

expresses the intent of a single action in a neutral fashion, whereas the side effects

“one entry was deleted from the enrollments table, and one cancellation reason was

added to the student feedback table” embed a lot of assumptions about the way the

Databases and Streams | 457

data is later going to be used. If a new application feature is introduced—for example,

“the place is offered to the next person on the waiting list”—the event sourcing

approach allows that new side effect to easily be chained off the existing event.

Event sourcing is similar to the chronicle data model [45], and there are also similarities between an event log and the fact table that you find in a star schema (see “Stars

and Snowflakes: Schemas for Analytics” on page 93).

Specialized databases such as Event Store [46] have been developed to support appli‐

cations using event sourcing, but in general the approach is independent of any par‐

ticular tool. A conventional database or a log-based message broker can also be used

to build applications in this style.

Deriving current state from the event log

An event log by itself is not very useful, because users generally expect to see the cur‐

rent state of a system, not the history of modifications. For example, on a shopping

website, users expect to be able to see the current contents of their cart, not an

append-only list of all the changes they have ever made to their cart.

Thus, applications that use event sourcing need to take the log of events (representing

the data written to the system) and transform it into application state that is suitable

for showing to a user (the way in which data is read from the system [47]). This transformation can use arbitrary logic, but it should be deterministic so that you can run it again and derive the same application state from the event log.

Like with change data capture, replaying the event log allows you to reconstruct the

current state of the system. However, log compaction needs to be handled differently:

• A CDC event for the update of a record typically contains the entire new version

of the record, so the current value for a primary key is entirely determined by the

most recent event for that primary key, and log compaction can discard previous

events for the same key.

• On the other hand, with event sourcing, events are modeled at a higher level: an

event typically expresses the intent of a user action, not the mechanics of the state

update that occurred as a result of the action. In this case, later events typically

do not override prior events, and so you need the full history of events to recon‐

struct the final state. Log compaction is not possible in the same way.

Applications that use event sourcing typically have some mechanism for storing

snapshots of the current state that is derived from the log of events, so they don’t

need to repeatedly reprocess the full log. However, this is only a performance optimi‐

zation to speed up reads and recovery from crashes; the intention is that the system is

able to store all raw events forever and reprocess the full event log whenever required.

We discuss this assumption in “Limitations of immutability” on page 463.

458 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Commands and events

The event sourcing philosophy is careful to distinguish between events and com‐

mands [48]. When a request from a user first arrives, it is initially a command: at this point it may still fail, for example because some integrity condition is violated. The application must first validate that it can execute the command. If the validation is

successful and the command is accepted, it becomes an event, which is durable and

immutable.

For example, if a user tries to register a particular username, or reserve a seat on an

airplane or in a theater, then the application needs to check that the username or seat

is not already taken. (We previously discussed this example in “Fault-Tolerant Con‐

sensus” on page 364.) When that check has succeeded, the application can generate

an event to indicate that a particular username was registered by a particular user ID,

or that a particular seat has been reserved for a particular customer.

At the point when the event is generated, it becomes a fact. Even if the customer later

decides to change or cancel the reservation, the fact remains true that they formerly

held a reservation for a particular seat, and the change or cancellation is a separate

event that is added later.

A consumer of the event stream is not allowed to reject an event: by the time the con‐

sumer sees the event, it is already an immutable part of the log, and it may have

already been seen by other consumers. Thus, any validation of a command needs to

happen synchronously, before it becomes an event—for example, by using a serializa‐

ble transaction that atomically validates the command and publishes the event.

Alternatively, the user request to reserve a seat could be split into two events: first a

tentative reservation, and then a separate confirmation event once the reservation has

been validated (as discussed in “Implementing linearizable storage using total order

broadcast” on page 350). This split allows the validation to take place in an asynchro‐

nous process.

State, Streams, and Immutability

We saw in Chapter 10 that batch processing benefits from the immutability of its

input files, so you can run experimental processing jobs on existing input files

without fear of damaging them. This principle of immutability is also what makes

event sourcing and change data capture so powerful.

We normally think of databases as storing the current state of the application—this

representation is optimized for reads, and it is usually the most convenient for serv‐

ing queries. The nature of state is that it changes, so databases support updating and

deleting data as well as inserting it. How does this fit with immutability?

Databases and Streams | 459

Whenever you have state that changes, that state is the result of the events that muta‐

ted it over time. For example, your list of currently available seats is the result of the

reservations you have processed, the current account balance is the result of the cred‐

its and debits on the account, and the response time graph for your web server is an

aggregation of the individual response times of all web requests that have occurred.

No matter how the state changes, there was always a sequence of events that caused

those changes. Even as things are done and undone, the fact remains true that those

events occurred. The key idea is that mutable state and an append-only log of immut‐

able events do not contradict each other: they are two sides of the same coin. The log

of all changes, the changelog, represents the evolution of state over time.

If you are mathematically inclined, you might say that the application state is what

you get when you integrate an event stream over time, and a change stream is what

you get when you differentiate the state by time, as shown in Figure 11-6 [49, 50, 51].

The analogy has limitations (for example, the second derivative of state does not

seem to be meaningful), but it’s a useful starting point for thinking about data.

Figure 11-6. The relationship between the current application state and an event

stream.

If you store the changelog durably, that simply has the effect of making the state

reproducible. If you consider the log of events to be your system of record, and any

mutable state as being derived from it, it becomes easier to reason about the flow of

data through a system. As Pat Helland puts it [52]:

Transaction logs record all the changes made to the database. High-speed appends are

the only way to change the log. From this perspective, the contents of the database

hold a caching of the latest record values in the logs. The truth is the log. The database

is a cache of a subset of the log. That cached subset happens to be the latest value of

each record and index value from the log.

Log compaction, as discussed in “Log compaction” on page 456, is one way of bridg‐

ing the distinction between log and database state: it retains only the latest version of

each record, and discards overwritten versions.

Advantages of immutable events

Immutability in databases is an old idea. For example, accountants have been using

immutability for centuries in financial bookkeeping. When a transaction occurs, it is

460 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

recorded in an append-only ledger, which is essentially a log of events describing money, goods, or services that have changed hands. The accounts, such as profit and loss or the balance sheet, are derived from the transactions in the ledger by adding

them up [53].

If a mistake is made, accountants don’t erase or change the incorrect transaction in

the ledger—instead, they add another transaction that compensates for the mistake,

for example refunding an incorrect charge. The incorrect transaction still remains in

the ledger forever, because it might be important for auditing reasons. If incorrect

figures, derived from the incorrect ledger, have already been published, then the fig‐

ures for the next accounting period include a correction. This process is entirely nor‐

mal in accounting [54].

Although such auditability is particularly important in financial systems, it is also

beneficial for many other systems that are not subject to such strict regulation. As

discussed in “Philosophy of batch process outputs” on page 413, if you accidentally

deploy buggy code that writes bad data to a database, recovery is much harder if the

code is able to destructively overwrite data. With an append-only log of immutable

events, it is much easier to diagnose what happened and recover from the problem.

Immutable events also capture more information than just the current state. For

example, on a shopping website, a customer may add an item to their cart and then

remove it again. Although the second event cancels out the first event from the point

of view of order fulfillment, it may be useful to know for analytics purposes that the

customer was considering a particular item but then decided against it. Perhaps they

will choose to buy it in the future, or perhaps they found a substitute. This informa‐

tion is recorded in an event log, but would be lost in a database that deletes items

when they are removed from the cart [42].

Deriving several views from the same event log

Moreover, by separating mutable state from the immutable event log, you can derive

several different read-oriented representations from the same log of events. This

works just like having multiple consumers of a stream (Figure 11-5): for example, the

analytic database Druid ingests directly from Kafka using this approach [55], Pista‐

chio is a distributed key-value store that uses Kafka as a commit log [56], and Kafka

Connect sinks can export data from Kafka to various different databases and indexes

[41]. It would make sense for many other storage and indexing systems, such as

search servers, to similarly take their input from a distributed log (see “Keeping Sys‐

tems in Sync” on page 452).

Having an explicit translation step from an event log to a database makes it easier to

evolve your application over time: if you want to introduce a new feature that

presents your existing data in some new way, you can use the event log to build a

separate read-optimized view for the new feature, and run it alongside the existing

Databases and Streams | 461

systems without having to modify them. Running old and new systems side by side is

often easier than performing a complicated schema migration in an existing system.

Once the old system is no longer needed, you can simply shut it down and reclaim its

resources [47, 57].

Storing data is normally quite straightforward if you don’t have to worry about how it

is going to be queried and accessed; many of the complexities of schema design,

indexing, and storage engines are the result of wanting to support certain query and

access patterns (see Chapter 3). For this reason, you gain a lot of flexibility by sepa‐

rating the form in which data is written from the form it is read, and by allowing sev‐

eral different read views. This idea is sometimes known as command query

responsibility segregation (CQRS) [42, 58, 59].

The traditional approach to database and schema design is based on the fallacy that

data must be written in the same form as it will be queried. Debates about normaliza‐

tion and denormalization (see “Many-to-One and Many-to-Many Relationships” on

page 33) become largely irrelevant if you can translate data from a write-optimized

event log to read-optimized application state: it is entirely reasonable to denormalize

data in the read-optimized views, as the translation process gives you a mechanism

for keeping it consistent with the event log.

In “Describing Load” on page 11 we discussed Twitter’s home timelines, a cache of

recently written tweets by the people a particular user is following (like a mailbox).

This is another example of read-optimized state: home timelines are highly denor‐

malized, since your tweets are duplicated in all of the timelines of the people follow‐

ing you. However, the fan-out service keeps this duplicated state in sync with new

tweets and new following relationships, which keeps the duplication manageable.

Concurrency control

The biggest downside of event sourcing and change data capture is that the consum‐

ers of the event log are usually asynchronous, so there is a possibility that a user may

make a write to the log, then read from a log-derived view and find that their write

has not yet been reflected in the read view. We discussed this problem and potential

solutions previously in “Reading Your Own Writes” on page 162.

One solution would be to perform the updates of the read view synchronously with

appending the event to the log. This requires a transaction to combine the writes into

an atomic unit, so either you need to keep the event log and the read view in the same

storage system, or you need a distributed transaction across the different systems.

Alternatively, you could use the approach discussed in “Implementing linearizable

storage using total order broadcast” on page 350.

On the other hand, deriving the current state from an event log also simplifies some

aspects of concurrency control. Much of the need for multi-object transactions (see

“Single-Object and Multi-Object Operations” on page 228) stems from a single user

462 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

action requiring data to be changed in several different places. With event sourcing,

you can design an event such that it is a self-contained description of a user action.

The user action then requires only a single write in one place—namely appending the

events to the log—which is easy to make atomic.

If the event log and the application state are partitioned in the same way (for exam‐

ple, processing an event for a customer in partition 3 only requires updating partition

3 of the application state), then a straightforward single-threaded log consumer needs

no concurrency control for writes—by construction, it only processes a single event

at a time (see also “Actual Serial Execution” on page 252). The log removes the non‐

determinism of concurrency by defining a serial order of events in a partition [24]. If

an event touches multiple state partitions, a bit more work is required, which we will

discuss in Chapter 12.

Limitations of immutability

Many systems that don’t use an event-sourced model nevertheless rely on immutabil‐

ity: various databases internally use immutable data structures or multi-version data

to support point-in-time snapshots (see “Indexes and snapshot isolation” on page

241). Version control systems such as Git, Mercurial, and Fossil also rely on immuta‐

ble data to preserve version history of files.

To what extent is it feasible to keep an immutable history of all changes forever? The

answer depends on the amount of churn in the dataset. Some workloads mostly add

data and rarely update or delete; they are easy to make immutable. Other workloads

have a high rate of updates and deletes on a comparatively small dataset; in these

cases, the immutable history may grow prohibitively large, fragmentation may

become an issue, and the performance of compaction and garbage collection

becomes crucial for operational robustness [60, 61].

Besides the performance reasons, there may also be circumstances in which you need

data to be deleted for administrative reasons, in spite of all immutability. For exam‐

ple, privacy regulations may require deleting a user’s personal information after they

close their account, data protection legislation may require erroneous information to

be removed, or an accidental leak of sensitive information may need to be contained.

In these circumstances, it’s not sufficient to just append another event to the log to

indicate that the prior data should be considered deleted—you actually want to

rewrite history and pretend that the data was never written in the first place. For

example, Datomic calls this feature excision [62], and the Fossil version control system has a similar concept called shunning [63].

Truly deleting data is surprisingly hard [64], since copies can live in many places: for example, storage engines, filesystems, and SSDs often write to a new location rather than overwriting in place [52], and backups are often deliberately immutable to pre‐

vent accidental deletion or corruption. Deletion is more a matter of “making it harder

Databases and Streams | 463

to retrieve the data” than actually “making it impossible to retrieve the data.” Never‐

theless, you sometimes have to try, as we shall see in “Legislation and self-regulation”

on page 542.

Processing Streams

So far in this chapter we have talked about where streams come from (user activity

events, sensors, and writes to databases), and we have talked about how streams are

transported (through direct messaging, via message brokers, and in event logs).

What remains is to discuss what you can do with the stream once you have it—

namely, you can process it. Broadly, there are three options:

1. You can take the data in the events and write it to a database, cache, search index,

or similar storage system, from where it can then be queried by other clients. As

shown in Figure 11-5, this is a good way of keeping a database in sync with

changes happening in other parts of the system—especially if the stream con‐

sumer is the only client writing to the database. Writing to a storage system is the

streaming equivalent of what we discussed in “The Output of Batch Workflows”

on page 411.

2. You can push the events to users in some way, for example by sending email

alerts or push notifications, or by streaming the events to a real-time dashboard

where they are visualized. In this case, a human is the ultimate consumer of the

stream.

3. You can process one or more input streams to produce one or more output

streams. Streams may go through a pipeline consisting of several such processing

stages before they eventually end up at an output (option 1 or 2).

In the rest of this chapter, we will discuss option 3: processing streams to produce

other, derived streams. A piece of code that processes streams like this is known as an

operator or a job. It is closely related to the Unix processes and MapReduce jobs we

discussed in Chapter 10, and the pattern of dataflow is similar: a stream processor

consumes input streams in a read-only fashion and writes its output to a different

location in an append-only fashion.

The patterns for partitioning and parallelization in stream processors are also very

similar to those in MapReduce and the dataflow engines we saw in Chapter 10, so we

won’t repeat those topics here. Basic mapping operations such as transforming and

filtering records also work the same.

The one crucial difference to batch jobs is that a stream never ends. This difference

has many implications: as discussed at the start of this chapter, sorting does not make

sense with an unbounded dataset, and so sort-merge joins (see “Reduce-Side Joins

and Grouping” on page 403) cannot be used. Fault-tolerance mechanisms must also

464 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

change: with a batch job that has been running for a few minutes, a failed task can

simply be restarted from the beginning, but with a stream job that has been running

for several years, restarting from the beginning after a crash may not be a viable

option.

Uses of Stream Processing

Stream processing has long been used for monitoring purposes, where an organiza‐

tion wants to be alerted if certain things happen. For example:

• Fraud detection systems need to determine if the usage patterns of a credit card

have unexpectedly changed, and block the card if it is likely to have been stolen.

• Trading systems need to examine price changes in a financial market and execute

trades according to specified rules.

• Manufacturing systems need to monitor the status of machines in a factory, and

quickly identify the problem if there is a malfunction.

• Military and intelligence systems need to track the activities of a potential aggres‐

sor, and raise the alarm if there are signs of an attack.

These kinds of applications require quite sophisticated pattern matching and correla‐

tions. However, other uses of stream processing have also emerged over time. In this

section we will briefly compare and contrast some of these applications.

Complex event processing

Complex event processing (CEP) is an approach developed in the 1990s for analyzing

event streams, especially geared toward the kind of application that requires search‐

ing for certain event patterns [65, 66]. Similarly to the way that a regular expression allows you to search for certain patterns of characters in a string, CEP allows you to specify rules to search for certain patterns of events in a stream.

CEP systems often use a high-level declarative query language like SQL, or a graphi‐

cal user interface, to describe the patterns of events that should be detected. These

queries are submitted to a processing engine that consumes the input streams and

internally maintains a state machine that performs the required matching. When a

match is found, the engine emits a complex event (hence the name) with the details of

the event pattern that was detected [67].

In these systems, the relationship between queries and data is reversed compared to

normal databases. Usually, a database stores data persistently and treats queries as

transient: when a query comes in, the database searches for data matching the query,

and then forgets about the query when it has finished. CEP engines reverse these

roles: queries are stored long-term, and events from the input streams continuously

flow past them in search of a query that matches an event pattern [68].

Processing Streams | 465

Implementations of CEP include Esper [69], IBM InfoSphere Streams [70], Apama, TIBCO StreamBase, and SQLstream. Distributed stream processors like Samza are also gaining SQL support for declarative queries on streams [71].

Stream analytics

Another area in which stream processing is used is for analytics on streams. The

boundary between CEP and stream analytics is blurry, but as a general rule, analytics

tends to be less interested in finding specific event sequences and is more oriented

toward aggregations and statistical metrics over a large number of events—for exam‐

ple:

• Measuring the rate of some type of event (how often it occurs per time interval)

• Calculating the rolling average of a value over some time period

• Comparing current statistics to previous time intervals (e.g., to detect trends or

to alert on metrics that are unusually high or low compared to the same time last

week)

Such statistics are usually computed over fixed time intervals—for example, you

might want to know the average number of queries per second to a service over the

last 5 minutes, and their 99th percentile response time during that period. Averaging

over a few minutes smoothes out irrelevant fluctuations from one second to the next,

while still giving you a timely picture of any changes in traffic pattern. The time

interval over which you aggregate is known as a window, and we will look into win‐

dowing in more detail in “Reasoning About Time” on page 468.

Stream analytics systems sometimes use probabilistic algorithms, such as Bloom fil‐

ters (which we encountered in “Performance optimizations” on page 79) for set

membership, HyperLogLog [72] for cardinality estimation, and various percentile

estimation algorithms (see “Percentiles in Practice” on page 16). Probabilistic algo‐

rithms produce approximate results, but have the advantage of requiring significantly

less memory in the stream processor than exact algorithms. This use of approxima‐

tion algorithms sometimes leads people to believe that stream processing systems are

always lossy and inexact, but that is wrong: there is nothing inherently approximate

about stream processing, and probabilistic algorithms are merely an optimization

[73].

Many open source distributed stream processing frameworks are designed with ana‐

lytics in mind: for example, Apache Storm, Spark Streaming, Flink, Concord, Samza,

and Kafka Streams [74]. Hosted services include Google Cloud Dataflow and Azure

Stream Analytics.

466 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Maintaining materialized views

We saw in “Databases and Streams” on page 451 that a stream of changes to a data‐

base can be used to keep derived data systems, such as caches, search indexes, and

data warehouses, up to date with a source database. We can regard these examples as

specific cases of maintaining materialized views (see “Aggregation: Data Cubes and

Materialized Views” on page 101): deriving an alternative view onto some dataset so

that you can query it efficiently, and updating that view whenever the underlying

data changes [50].

Similarly, in event sourcing, application state is maintained by applying a log of

events; here the application state is also a kind of materialized view. Unlike stream

analytics scenarios, it is usually not sufficient to consider only events within some

time window: building the materialized view potentially requires all events over an

arbitrary time period, apart from any obsolete events that may be discarded by log

compaction (see “Log compaction” on page 456). In effect, you need a window that

stretches all the way back to the beginning of time.

In principle, any stream processor could be used for materialized view maintenance,

although the need to maintain events forever runs counter to the assumptions of

some analytics-oriented frameworks that mostly operate on windows of a limited

duration. Samza and Kafka Streams support this kind of usage, building upon Kafka’s

support for log compaction [75].

Search on streams

Besides CEP, which allows searching for patterns consisting of multiple events, there

is also sometimes a need to search for individual events based on complex criteria,

such as full-text search queries.

For example, media monitoring services subscribe to feeds of news articles and

broadcasts from media outlets, and search for any news mentioning companies,

products, or topics of interest. This is done by formulating a search query in advance,

and then continually matching the stream of news items against this query. Similar

features exist on some websites: for example, users of real estate websites can ask to

be notified when a new property matching their search criteria appears on the mar‐

ket. The percolator feature of Elasticsearch [76] is one option for implementing this

kind of stream search.

Conventional search engines first index the documents and then run queries over the

index. By contrast, searching a stream turns the processing on its head: the queries

are stored, and the documents run past the queries, like in CEP. In the simplest case,

you can test every document against every query, although this can get slow if you

have a large number of queries. To optimize the process, it is possible to index the

queries as well as the documents, and thus narrow down the set of queries that may

match [77].

Processing Streams | 467

Message passing and RPC

In “Message-Passing Dataflow” on page 136 we discussed message-passing systems as

an alternative to RPC—i.e., as a mechanism for services to communicate, as used for

example in the actor model. Although these systems are also based on messages and

events, we normally don’t think of them as stream processors:

• Actor frameworks are primarily a mechanism for managing concurrency and

distributed execution of communicating modules, whereas stream processing is

primarily a data management technique.

• Communication between actors is often ephemeral and one-to-one, whereas

event logs are durable and multi-subscriber.

• Actors can communicate in arbitrary ways (including cyclic request/response

patterns), but stream processors are usually set up in acyclic pipelines where

every stream is the output of one particular job, and derived from a well-defined

set of input streams.

That said, there is some crossover area between RPC-like systems and stream pro‐

cessing. For example, Apache Storm has a feature called distributed RPC, which

allows user queries to be farmed out to a set of nodes that also process event streams;

these queries are then interleaved with events from the input streams, and results can

be aggregated and sent back to the user [78]. (See also “Multi-partition data process‐

ing” on page 514.)

It is also possible to process streams using actor frameworks. However, many such

frameworks do not guarantee message delivery in the case of crashes, so the process‐

ing is not fault-tolerant unless you implement additional retry logic.

Reasoning About Time

Stream processors often need to deal with time, especially when used for analytics

purposes, which frequently use time windows such as “the average over the last five

minutes.” It might seem that the meaning of “the last five minutes” should be unam‐

biguous and clear, but unfortunately the notion is surprisingly tricky.

In a batch process, the processing tasks rapidly crunch through a large collection of

historical events. If some kind of breakdown by time needs to happen, the batch pro‐

cess needs to look at the timestamp embedded in each event. There is no point in

looking at the system clock of the machine running the batch process, because the

time at which the process is run has nothing to do with the time at which the events

actually occurred.

A batch process may read a year’s worth of historical events within a few minutes; in

most cases, the timeline of interest is the year of history, not the few minutes of pro‐

cessing. Moreover, using the timestamps in the events allows the processing to be

468 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

deterministic: running the same process again on the same input yields the same

result (see “Fault tolerance” on page 422).

On the other hand, many stream processing frameworks use the local system clock

on the processing machine (the processing time) to determine windowing [79]. This

approach has the advantage of being simple, and it is reasonable if the delay between

event creation and event processing is negligibly short. However, it breaks down if

there is any significant processing lag—i.e., if the processing may happen noticeably

later than the time at which the event actually occurred.

Event time versus processing time

There are many reasons why processing may be delayed: queueing, network faults

(see “Unreliable Networks” on page 277), a performance issue leading to contention

in the message broker or processor, a restart of the stream consumer, or reprocessing

of past events (see “Replaying old messages” on page 451) while recovering from a

fault or after fixing a bug in the code.

Moreover, message delays can also lead to unpredictable ordering of messages. For

example, say a user first makes one web request (which is handled by web server A),

and then a second request (which is handled by server B). A and B emit events

describing the requests they handled, but B’s event reaches the message broker before

A’s event does. Now stream processors will first see the B event and then the A event,

even though they actually occurred in the opposite order.

If it helps to have an analogy, consider the Star Wars movies: Episode IV was released

in 1977, Episode V in 1980, and Episode VI in 1983, followed by Episodes I, II, and

III in 1999, 2002, and 2005, respectively, and Episode VII in 2015 [80]. ii If you

watched the movies in the order they came out, the order in which you processed the

movies is inconsistent with the order of their narrative. (The episode number is like

the event timestamp, and the date when you watched the movie is the processing

time.) As humans, we are able to cope with such discontinuities, but stream process‐

ing algorithms need to be specifically written to accommodate such timing and

ordering issues.

Confusing event time and processing time leads to bad data. For example, say you

have a stream processor that measures the rate of requests (counting the number of

requests per second). If you redeploy the stream processor, it may be shut down for a

minute and process the backlog of events when it comes back up. If you measure the

rate based on the processing time, it will look as if there was a sudden anomalous

spike of requests while processing the backlog, when in fact the real rate of requests

was steady (Figure 11-7).

ii. Thank you to Kostas Kloudas from the Flink community for coming up with this analogy.

Processing Streams | 469

Figure 11-7. Windowing by processing time introduces artifacts due to variations in

processing rate.

Knowing when you’re ready

A tricky problem when defining windows in terms of event time is that you can never

be sure when you have received all of the events for a particular window, or whether

there are some events still to come.

For example, say you’re grouping events into one-minute windows so that you can

count the number of requests per minute. You have counted some number of events

with timestamps that fall in the 37th minute of the hour, and time has moved on;

now most of the incoming events fall within the 38th and 39th minutes of the hour.

When do you declare that you have finished the window for the 37th minute, and

output its counter value?

You can time out and declare a window ready after you have not seen any new events

for a while, but it could still happen that some events were buffered on another

machine somewhere, delayed due to a network interruption. You need to be able to

handle such straggler events that arrive after the window has already been declared

complete. Broadly, you have two options [1]:

1. Ignore the straggler events, as they are probably a small percentage of events in

normal circumstances. You can track the number of dropped events as a metric,

and alert if you start dropping a significant amount of data.

2. Publish a correction, an updated value for the window with stragglers included.

You may also need to retract the previous output.

470 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

In some cases it is possible to use a special message to indicate, “From now on there

will be no more messages with a timestamp earlier than t,” which can be used by con‐

sumers to trigger windows [81]. However, if several producers on different machines

are generating events, each with their own minimum timestamp thresholds, the con‐

sumers need to keep track of each producer individually. Adding and removing pro‐

ducers is trickier in this case.

Whose clock are you using, anyway?

Assigning timestamps to events is even more difficult when events can be buffered at

several points in the system. For example, consider a mobile app that reports events

for usage metrics to a server. The app may be used while the device is offline, in

which case it will buffer events locally on the device and send them to a server when

an internet connection is next available (which may be hours or even days later). To

any consumers of this stream, the events will appear as extremely delayed stragglers.

In this context, the timestamp on the events should really be the time at which the

user interaction occurred, according to the mobile device’s local clock. However, the

clock on a user-controlled device often cannot be trusted, as it may be accidentally or

deliberately set to the wrong time (see “Clock Synchronization and Accuracy” on

page 289). The time at which the event was received by the server (according to the

server’s clock) is more likely to be accurate, since the server is under your control, but

less meaningful in terms of describing the user interaction.

To adjust for incorrect device clocks, one approach is to log three timestamps [82]:

• The time at which the event occurred, according to the device clock

• The time at which the event was sent to the server, according to the device clock

• The time at which the event was received by the server, according to the server

clock

By subtracting the second timestamp from the third, you can estimate the offset

between the device clock and the server clock (assuming the network delay is negligi‐

ble compared to the required timestamp accuracy). You can then apply that offset to

the event timestamp, and thus estimate the true time at which the event actually

occurred (assuming the device clock offset did not change between the time the event

occurred and the time it was sent to the server).

This problem is not unique to stream processing—batch processing suffers from

exactly the same issues of reasoning about time. It is just more noticeable in a stream‐

ing context, where we are more aware of the passage of time.

Processing Streams | 471

Types of windows

Once you know how the timestamp of an event should be determined, the next step

is to decide how windows over time periods should be defined. The window can then

be used for aggregations, for example to count events, or to calculate the average of

values within the window. Several types of windows are in common use [79, 83]:

Tumbling window

A tumbling window has a fixed length, and every event belongs to exactly one

window. For example, if you have a 1-minute tumbling window, all the events

with timestamps between 10:03:00 and 10:03:59 are grouped into one window,

events between 10:04:00 and 10:04:59 into the next window, and so on. You

could implement a 1-minute tumbling window by taking each event timestamp

and rounding it down to the nearest minute to determine the window that it

belongs to.

Hopping window

A hopping window also has a fixed length, but allows windows to overlap in

order to provide some smoothing. For example, a 5-minute window with a hop

size of 1 minute would contain the events between 10:03:00 and 10:07:59, then

the next window would cover events between 10:04:00 and 10:08:59, and so on.

You can implement this hopping window by first calculating 1-minute tumbling

windows, and then aggregating over several adjacent windows.

Sliding window

A sliding window contains all the events that occur within some interval of each

other. For example, a 5-minute sliding window would cover events at 10:03:39

and 10:08:12, because they are less than 5 minutes apart (note that tumbling and

hopping 5-minute windows would not have put these two events in the same

window, as they use fixed boundaries). A sliding window can be implemented by

keeping a buffer of events sorted by time and removing old events when they

expire from the window.

Session window

Unlike the other window types, a session window has no fixed duration. Instead,

it is defined by grouping together all events for the same user that occur closely

together in time, and the window ends when the user has been inactive for some

time (for example, if there have been no events for 30 minutes). Sessionization is

a common requirement for website analytics (see “GROUP BY” on page 406).

Stream Joins

In Chapter 10 we discussed how batch jobs can join datasets by key, and how such

joins form an important part of data pipelines. Since stream processing generalizes

472 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

data pipelines to incremental processing of unbounded datasets, there is exactly the

same need for joins on streams.

However, the fact that new events can appear anytime on a stream makes joins on

streams more challenging than in batch jobs. To understand the situation better, let’s

distinguish three different types of joins: stream-stream joins, stream-table joins, and

table-table joins [84]. In the following sections we’ll illustrate each by example.

Stream-stream join (window join)

Say you have a search feature on your website, and you want to detect recent trends

in searched-for URLs. Every time someone types a search query, you log an event

containing the query and the results returned. Every time someone clicks one of the

search results, you log another event recording the click. In order to calculate the

click-through rate for each URL in the search results, you need to bring together the

events for the search action and the click action, which are connected by having the

same session ID. Similar analyses are needed in advertising systems [85].

The click may never come if the user abandons their search, and even if it comes, the

time between the search and the click may be highly variable: in many cases it might

be a few seconds, but it could be as long as days or weeks (if a user runs a search,

forgets about that browser tab, and then returns to the tab and clicks a result some‐

time later). Due to variable network delays, the click event may even arrive before the

search event. You can choose a suitable window for the join—for example, you may

choose to join a click with a search if they occur at most one hour apart.

Note that embedding the details of the search in the click event is not equivalent to

joining the events: doing so would only tell you about the cases where the user

clicked a search result, not about the searches where the user did not click any of the

results. In order to measure search quality, you need accurate click-through rates, for

which you need both the search events and the click events.

To implement this type of join, a stream processor needs to maintain state: for exam‐

ple, all the events that occurred in the last hour, indexed by session ID. Whenever a

search event or click event occurs, it is added to the appropriate index, and the

stream processor also checks the other index to see if another event for the same ses‐

sion ID has already arrived. If there is a matching event, you emit an event saying

which search result was clicked. If the search event expires without you seeing a

matching click event, you emit an event saying which search results were not clicked.

Stream-table join (stream enrichment)

In “Example: analysis of user activity events” on page 404 (Figure 10-2) we saw an example of a batch job joining two datasets: a set of user activity events and a database of user profiles. It is natural to think of the user activity events as a stream, and to perform the same join on a continuous basis in a stream processor: the input is a

Processing Streams | 473

stream of activity events containing a user ID, and the output is a stream of activity

events in which the user ID has been augmented with profile information about the

user. This process is sometimes known as enriching the activity events with informa‐

tion from the database.

To perform this join, the stream process needs to look at one activity event at a time,

look up the event’s user ID in the database, and add the profile information to the

activity event. The database lookup could be implemented by querying a remote

database; however, as discussed in “Example: analysis of user activity events” on page

404, such remote queries are likely to be slow and risk overloading the database [75].

Another approach is to load a copy of the database into the stream processor so that

it can be queried locally without a network round-trip. This technique is very similar

to the hash joins we discussed in “Map-Side Joins” on page 408: the local copy of the

database might be an in-memory hash table if it is small enough, or an index on the

local disk.

The difference to batch jobs is that a batch job uses a point-in-time snapshot of the

database as input, whereas a stream processor is long-running, and the contents of

the database are likely to change over time, so the stream processor’s local copy of the

database needs to be kept up to date. This issue can be solved by change data capture:

the stream processor can subscribe to a changelog of the user profile database as well

as the stream of activity events. When a profile is created or modified, the stream

processor updates its local copy. Thus, we obtain a join between two streams: the

activity events and the profile updates.

A stream-table join is actually very similar to a stream-stream join; the biggest differ‐

ence is that for the table changelog stream, the join uses a window that reaches back

to the “beginning of time” (a conceptually infinite window), with newer versions of

records overwriting older ones. For the stream input, the join might not maintain a

window at all.

Table-table join (materialized view maintenance)

Consider the Twitter timeline example that we discussed in “Describing Load” on

page 11. We said that when a user wants to view their home timeline, it is too expen‐

sive to iterate over all the people the user is following, find their recent tweets, and

merge them.

Instead, we want a timeline cache: a kind of per-user “inbox” to which tweets are

written as they are sent, so that reading the timeline is a single lookup. Materializing

and maintaining this cache requires the following event processing:

• When user u sends a new tweet, it is added to the timeline of every user who is

following u.

474 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

• When a user deletes a tweet, it is removed from all users’ timelines.

• When user u 1 starts following user u 2, recent tweets by u 2 are added to u 1’s timeline.

• When user u 1 unfollows user u 2, tweets by u 2 are removed from u 1’s timeline.

To implement this cache maintenance in a stream processor, you need streams of

events for tweets (sending and deleting) and for follow relationships (following and

unfollowing). The stream process needs to maintain a database containing the set of

followers for each user so that it knows which timelines need to be updated when a

new tweet arrives [86].

Another way of looking at this stream process is that it maintains a materialized view

for a query that joins two tables (tweets and follows), something like the following:

SELECT follows.follower_id AS timeline_id,

array_agg(tweets.* ORDER BY tweets. timestamp DESC)

FROM tweets

JOIN follows ON follows.followee_id = tweets.sender_id

GROUP BY follows.follower_id

The join of the streams corresponds directly to the join of the tables in that query.

The timelines are effectively a cache of the result of this query, updated every time the

underlying tables change.iii

Time-dependence of joins

The three types of joins described here (stream-stream, stream-table, and table-table)

have a lot in common: they all require the stream processor to maintain some state

(search and click events, user profiles, or follower list) based on one join input, and

query that state on messages from the other join input.

The order of the events that maintain the state is important (it matters whether you

first follow and then unfollow, or the other way round). In a partitioned log, the

ordering of events within a single partition is preserved, but there is typically no

ordering guarantee across different streams or partitions.

This raises a question: if events on different streams happen around a similar time, in

which order are they processed? In the stream-table join example, if a user updates

their profile, which activity events are joined with the old profile (processed before

the profile update), and which are joined with the new profile (processed after the

iii. If you regard a stream as the derivative of a table, as in Figure 11-6, and regard a join as a product of two

tables u·v, something interesting happens: the stream of changes to the materialized join follows the product rule ( u·v)′ = u′ v + uv′. In words: any change of tweets is joined with the current followers, and any change of followers is joined with the current tweets [49, 50].

Processing Streams | 475

profile update)? Put another way: if state changes over time, and you join with some

state, what point in time do you use for the join [45]?

Such time dependence can occur in many places. For example, if you sell things, you

need to apply the right tax rate to invoices, which depends on the country or state,

the type of product, and the date of sale (since tax rates change from time to time).

When joining sales to a table of tax rates, you probably want to join with the tax rate

at the time of the sale, which may be different from the current tax rate if you are

reprocessing historical data.

If the ordering of events across streams is undetermined, the join becomes nondeter‐

ministic [87], which means you cannot rerun the same job on the same input and

necessarily get the same result: the events on the input streams may be interleaved in

a different way when you run the job again.

In data warehouses, this issue is known as a slowly changing dimension (SCD), and it

is often addressed by using a unique identifier for a particular version of the joined

record: for example, every time the tax rate changes, it is given a new identifier, and

the invoice includes the identifier for the tax rate at the time of sale [88, 89]. This change makes the join deterministic, but has the consequence that log compaction is not possible, since all versions of the records in the table need to be retained.

Fault Tolerance

In the final section of this chapter, let’s consider how stream processors can tolerate

faults. We saw in Chapter 10 that batch processing frameworks can tolerate faults

fairly easily: if a task in a MapReduce job fails, it can simply be started again on

another machine, and the output of the failed task is discarded. This transparent retry

is possible because input files are immutable, each task writes its output to a separate

file on HDFS, and output is only made visible when a task completes successfully.

In particular, the batch approach to fault tolerance ensures that the output of the

batch job is the same as if nothing had gone wrong, even if in fact some tasks did fail.

It appears as though every input record was processed exactly once—no records are

skipped, and none are processed twice. Although restarting tasks means that records

may in fact be processed multiple times, the visible effect in the output is as if they

had only been processed once. This principle is known as exactly-once semantics,

although effectively-once would be a more descriptive term [90].

The same issue of fault tolerance arises in stream processing, but it is less straightfor‐

ward to handle: waiting until a task is finished before making its output visible is not

an option, because a stream is infinite and so you can never finish processing it.

476 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

Microbatching and checkpointing

One solution is to break the stream into small blocks, and treat each block like a min‐

iature batch process. This approach is called microbatching, and it is used in Spark

Streaming [91]. The batch size is typically around one second, which is the result of a performance compromise: smaller batches incur greater scheduling and coordination overhead, while larger batches mean a longer delay before results of the stream pro‐

cessor become visible.

Microbatching also implicitly provides a tumbling window equal to the batch size

(windowed by processing time, not event timestamps); any jobs that require larger

windows need to explicitly carry over state from one microbatch to the next.

A variant approach, used in Apache Flink, is to periodically generate rolling check‐

points of state and write them to durable storage [92, 93]. If a stream operator

crashes, it can restart from its most recent checkpoint and discard any output gener‐

ated between the last checkpoint and the crash. The checkpoints are triggered by bar‐

riers in the message stream, similar to the boundaries between microbatches, but

without forcing a particular window size.

Within the confines of the stream processing framework, the microbatching and

checkpointing approaches provide the same exactly-once semantics as batch process‐

ing. However, as soon as output leaves the stream processor (for example, by writing

to a database, sending messages to an external message broker, or sending emails),

the framework is no longer able to discard the output of a failed batch. In this case,

restarting a failed task causes the external side effect to happen twice, and micro‐

batching or checkpointing alone is not sufficient to prevent this problem.

Atomic commit revisited

In order to give the appearance of exactly-once processing in the presence of faults,

we need to ensure that all outputs and side effects of processing an event take effect if

and only if the processing is successful. Those effects include any messages sent to

downstream operators or external messaging systems (including email or push notifi‐

cations), any database writes, any changes to operator state, and any acknowledg‐

ment of input messages (including moving the consumer offset forward in a log-

based message broker).

Those things either all need to happen atomically, or none of them must happen, but

they should not go out of sync with each other. If this approach sounds familiar, it is

because we discussed it in “Exactly-once message processing” on page 360 in the con‐

text of distributed transactions and two-phase commit.

In Chapter 9 we discussed the problems in the traditional implementations of dis‐

tributed transactions, such as XA. However, in more restricted environments it is

possible to implement such an atomic commit facility efficiently. This approach is

Processing Streams | 477

used in Google Cloud Dataflow [81, 92] and VoltDB [94], and there are plans to add

similar features to Apache Kafka [95, 96]. Unlike XA, these implementations do not

attempt to provide transactions across heterogeneous technologies, but instead keep

them internal by managing both state changes and messaging within the stream pro‐

cessing framework. The overhead of the transaction protocol can be amortized by

processing several input messages within a single transaction.

Idempotence

Our goal is to discard the partial output of any failed tasks so that they can be safely

retried without taking effect twice. Distributed transactions are one way of achieving

that goal, but another way is to rely on idempotence [97].

An idempotent operation is one that you can perform multiple times, and it has the

same effect as if you performed it only once. For example, setting a key in a key-value

store to some fixed value is idempotent (writing the value again simply overwrites the

value with an identical value), whereas incrementing a counter is not idempotent

(performing the increment again means the value is incremented twice).

Even if an operation is not naturally idempotent, it can often be made idempotent

with a bit of extra metadata. For example, when consuming messages from Kafka,

every message has a persistent, monotonically increasing offset. When writing a value

to an external database, you can include the offset of the message that triggered the

last write with the value. Thus, you can tell whether an update has already been

applied, and avoid performing the same update again.

The state handling in Storm’s Trident is based on a similar idea [78]. Relying on

idempotence implies several assumptions: restarting a failed task must replay the

same messages in the same order (a log-based message broker does this), the process‐

ing must be deterministic, and no other node may concurrently update the same

value [98, 99].

When failing over from one processing node to another, fencing may be required (see

“The leader and the lock” on page 301) to prevent interference from a node that is

thought to be dead but is actually alive. Despite all those caveats, idempotent opera‐

tions can be an effective way of achieving exactly-once semantics with only a small

overhead.

Rebuilding state after a failure

Any stream process that requires state—for example, any windowed aggregations

(such as counters, averages, and histograms) and any tables and indexes used for

joins—must ensure that this state can be recovered after a failure.

One option is to keep the state in a remote datastore and replicate it, although having

to query a remote database for each individual message can be slow, as discussed in

478 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

“Stream-table join (stream enrichment)” on page 473. An alternative is to keep state local to the stream processor, and replicate it periodically. Then, when the stream processor is recovering from a failure, the new task can read the replicated state and

resume processing without data loss.

For example, Flink periodically captures snapshots of operator state and writes them

to durable storage such as HDFS [92, 93]; Samza and Kafka Streams replicate state changes by sending them to a dedicated Kafka topic with log compaction, similar to change data capture [84, 100]. VoltDB replicates state by redundantly processing

each input message on several nodes (see “Actual Serial Execution” on page 252).

In some cases, it may not even be necessary to replicate the state, because it can be

rebuilt from the input streams. For example, if the state consists of aggregations over

a fairly short window, it may be fast enough to simply replay the input events corre‐

sponding to that window. If the state is a local replica of a database, maintained by

change data capture, the database can also be rebuilt from the log-compacted change

stream (see “Log compaction” on page 456).

However, all of these trade-offs depend on the performance characteristics of the

underlying infrastructure: in some systems, network delay may be lower than disk

access latency, and network bandwidth may be comparable to disk bandwidth. There

is no universally ideal trade-off for all situations, and the merits of local versus

remote state may also shift as storage and networking technologies evolve.

Summary

In this chapter we have discussed event streams, what purposes they serve, and how

to process them. In some ways, stream processing is very much like the batch pro‐

cessing we discussed in Chapter 10, but done continuously on unbounded (never-

ending) streams rather than on a fixed-size input. From this perspective, message

brokers and event logs serve as the streaming equivalent of a filesystem.

We spent some time comparing two types of message brokers:

AMQP/JMS-style message broker

The broker assigns individual messages to consumers, and consumers acknowl‐

edge individual messages when they have been successfully processed. Messages

are deleted from the broker once they have been acknowledged. This approach is

appropriate as an asynchronous form of RPC (see also “Message-Passing Data‐

flow” on page 136), for example in a task queue, where the exact order of mes‐

sage processing is not important and where there is no need to go back and read

old messages again after they have been processed.

Summary | 479

Log-based message broker

The broker assigns all messages in a partition to the same consumer node, and

always delivers messages in the same order. Parallelism is achieved through par‐

titioning, and consumers track their progress by checkpointing the offset of the

last message they have processed. The broker retains messages on disk, so it is

possible to jump back and reread old messages if necessary.

The log-based approach has similarities to the replication logs found in databases

(see Chapter 5) and log-structured storage engines (see Chapter 3). We saw that this

approach is especially appropriate for stream processing systems that consume input

streams and generate derived state or derived output streams.

In terms of where streams come from, we discussed several possibilities: user activity

events, sensors providing periodic readings, and data feeds (e.g., market data in

finance) are naturally represented as streams. We saw that it can also be useful to

think of the writes to a database as a stream: we can capture the changelog—i.e., the

history of all changes made to a database—either implicitly through change data cap‐

ture or explicitly through event sourcing. Log compaction allows the stream to retain

a full copy of the contents of a database.

Representing databases as streams opens up powerful opportunities for integrating

systems. You can keep derived data systems such as search indexes, caches, and ana‐

lytics systems continually up to date by consuming the log of changes and applying

them to the derived system. You can even build fresh views onto existing data by

starting from scratch and consuming the log of changes from the beginning all the

way to the present.

The facilities for maintaining state as streams and replaying messages are also the

basis for the techniques that enable stream joins and fault tolerance in various stream

processing frameworks. We discussed several purposes of stream processing, includ‐

ing searching for event patterns (complex event processing), computing windowed

aggregations (stream analytics), and keeping derived data systems up to date (materi‐

alized views).

We then discussed the difficulties of reasoning about time in a stream processor,

including the distinction between processing time and event timestamps, and the

problem of dealing with straggler events that arrive after you thought your window

was complete.

We distinguished three types of joins that may appear in stream processes:

Stream-stream joins

Both input streams consist of activity events, and the join operator searches for

related events that occur within some window of time. For example, it may

match two actions taken by the same user within 30 minutes of each other. The

480 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

two join inputs may in fact be the same stream (a self-join) if you want to find

related events within that one stream.

Stream-table joins

One input stream consists of activity events, while the other is a database change‐

log. The changelog keeps a local copy of the database up to date. For each activity

event, the join operator queries the database and outputs an enriched activity

event.

Table-table joins

Both input streams are database changelogs. In this case, every change on one

side is joined with the latest state of the other side. The result is a stream of

changes to the materialized view of the join between the two tables.

Finally, we discussed techniques for achieving fault tolerance and exactly-once

semantics in a stream processor. As with batch processing, we need to discard the

partial output of any failed tasks. However, since a stream process is long-running

and produces output continuously, we can’t simply discard all output. Instead, a

finer-grained recovery mechanism can be used, based on microbatching, checkpoint‐

ing, transactions, or idempotent writes.

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[29] Ben Osheroff: “Introducing Maxwell, a mysql-to-kafka Binlog Processor,” developer.zendesk.com, August 20, 2015.

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[36] Slava Akhmechet: “Advancing the Realtime Web,” rethinkdb.com, January 27, 2015.

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[38] “Apache CouchDB 1.6 Documentation,” docs.couchdb.org, 2014.

[39] Matt DeBergalis: “Meteor 0.7.0: Scalable Database Queries Using MongoDB

Oplog Instead of Poll-and-Diff,” info.meteor.com, December 17, 2013.

[40] “Chapter 15. Importing and Exporting Live Data,” VoltDB 6.4 User Manual, docs.voltdb.com, June 2016.

[41] Neha Narkhede: “Announcing Kafka Connect: Building Large-Scale Low-

Latency Data Pipelines,” confluent.io, February 18, 2016.

[42] Greg Young: “CQRS and Event Sourcing,” at Code on the Beach, August 2014.

[43] Martin Fowler: “Event Sourcing,” martinfowler.com, December 12, 2005.

Summary | 483

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Maintenance Issues for the Chronicle Data Model,” at 14th ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), May 1995. doi:

10.1145/212433.220201

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[47] Martin Kleppmann: Making Sense of Stream Processing. Report, O’Reilly Media, May 2016.

[48] Sander Mak: “Event-Sourced Architectures with Akka,” at JavaOne, September 2014.

[49] Julian Hyde: personal communication, June 2016.

[50] Ashish Gupta and Inderpal Singh Mumick: Materialized Views: Techniques,

Implementations, and Applications. MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 978-0-262-57122-7

[51] Timothy Griffin and Leonid Libkin: “Incremental Maintenance of Views with

Duplicates,” at ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), May 1995. doi:10.1145/223784.223849

[52] Pat Helland: “Immutability Changes Everything,” at 7th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2015.

[53] Martin Kleppmann: “Accounting for Computer Scientists,” martin.kleppmann.com, March 7, 2011.

[54] Pat Helland: “Accountants Don’t Use Erasers,” blogs.msdn.com, June 14, 2007.

[55] Fangjin Yang: “Dogfooding with Druid, Samza, and Kafka: Metametrics at Met‐

amarkets,” metamarkets.com, June 3, 2015.

[56] Gavin Li, Jianqiu Lv, and Hang Qi: “Pistachio: Co-Locate the Data and Compute

for Fastest Cloud Compute,” yahoohadoop.tumblr.com, April 13, 2015.

[57] Kartik Paramasivam: “Stream Processing Hard Problems – Part 1: Killing

Lambda,” engineering.linkedin.com, June 27, 2016.

[58] Martin Fowler: “CQRS,” martinfowler.com, July 14, 2011.

[59] Greg Young: “CQRS Documents,” cqrs.files.wordpress.com, November 2010.

[60] Baron Schwartz: “Immutability, MVCC, and Garbage Collection,” xaprb.com, December 28, 2013.

484 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

[61] Daniel Eloff, Slava Akhmechet, Jay Kreps, et al.: “Re: Turning the Database

Inside-out with Apache Samza,” Hacker News discussion, news.ycombinator.com, March 4, 2015.

[62] “Datomic Development Resources: Excision,” Cognitect, Inc., docs.datomic.com.

[63] “Fossil Documentation: Deleting Content from Fossil,” fossil-scm.org, 2016.

[64] Jay Kreps: “The irony of distributed systems is that data loss is really easy but

deleting data is surprisingly hard,” twitter.com, March 30, 2015.

[65] David C. Luckham: “What’s the Difference Between ESP and CEP?,” complexevents.com, August 1, 2006.

[66] Srinath Perera: “How Is Stream Processing and Complex Event Processing

(CEP) Different?,” quora.com, December 3, 2015.

[67] Arvind Arasu, Shivnath Babu, and Jennifer Widom: “The CQL Continuous

Query Language: Semantic Foundations and Query Execution,” The VLDB Journal, volume 15, number 2, pages 121–142, June 2006. doi:10.1007/s00778-004-0147-z

[68] Julian Hyde: “Data in Flight: How Streaming SQL Technology Can Help Solve

the Web 2.0 Data Crunch,” ACM Queue, volume 7, number 11, December 2009. doi:

10.1145/1661785.1667562

[69] “Esper Reference, Version 5.4.0,” EsperTech, Inc., espertech.com, April 2016.

[70] Zubair Nabi, Eric Bouillet, Andrew Bainbridge, and Chris Thomas: “Of Streams

and Storms,” IBM technical report, developer.ibm.com, April 2014.

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Log: The Analysis of a Near-Optimal Cardinality Estimation Algorithm,” at Conference on Analysis of Algorithms (AofA), June 2007.

[73] Jay Kreps: “Questioning the Lambda Architecture,” oreilly.com, July 2, 2014.

[74] Ian Hellström: “An Overview of Apache Streaming Technologies,” databaseline.wordpress.com, March 12, 2016.

[75] Jay Kreps: “Why Local State Is a Fundamental Primitive in Stream Processing,”

oreilly.com, July 31, 2014.

[76] Shay Banon: “Percolator,” elastic.co, February 8, 2011.

[77] Alan Woodward and Martin Kleppmann: “Real-Time Full-Text Search with

Luwak and Samza,” martin.kleppmann.com, April 13, 2015.

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[78] “Apache Storm 1.0.1 Documentation,” storm.apache.org, May 2016.

[79] Tyler Akidau: “The World Beyond Batch: Streaming 102,” oreilly.com, January 20, 2016.

[80] Stephan Ewen: “Streaming Analytics with Apache Flink,” at Kafka Summit, April 2016.

[81] Tyler Akidau, Alex Balikov, Kaya Bekiroğlu, et al.: “MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant

Stream Processing at Internet Scale,” at 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), August 2013.

[82] Alex Dean: “Improving Snowplow’s Understanding of Time,” snowplowanalytics.com, September 15, 2015.

[83] “Windowing (Azure Stream Analytics),” Microsoft Azure Reference,

msdn.microsoft.com, April 2016.

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Fault-Tolerant and Scalable Joining of Continuous Data Streams,” at ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), June 2013. doi:

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[86] Martin Kleppmann: “Samza Newsfeed Demo,” github.com, September 2014.

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ben.kirw.in, November 28, 2014.

[88] Pat Helland: “Data on the Outside Versus Data on the Inside,” at 2nd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2005.

[89] Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross: The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive

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with at-least-once + idempotent operations,” twitter.com, October 20, 2016.

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[92] Kostas Tzoumas, Stephan Ewen, and Robert Metzger: “High-Throughput, Low-

Latency, and Exactly-Once Stream Processing with Apache Flink,” data-artisans.com, August 5, 2015.

486 | Chapter 11: Stream Processing

[93] Paris Carbone, Gyula Fóra, Stephan Ewen, et al.: “Lightweight Asynchronous

Snapshots for Distributed Dataflows,” arXiv:1506.08603 [cs.DC], June 29, 2015.

[94] Ryan Betts and John Hugg: Fast Data: Smart and at Scale. Report, O’Reilly

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[96] Jason Gustafson, Flavio Junqueira, Apurva Mehta, Sriram Subramanian, and

Guozhang Wang: “KIP-98 – Exactly Once Delivery and Transactional Messaging,”

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[97] Pat Helland: “Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition,” Communications of the ACM, volume 55, number 5, page 56, May 2012. doi:10.1145/2160718.2160734

[98] Jay Kreps: “Re: Trying to Achieve Deterministic Behavior on Recovery/Rewind,”

email to samza-dev mailing list, September 9, 2014.

[99] E. N. (Mootaz) Elnozahy, Lorenzo Alvisi, Yi-Min Wang, and David B. Johnson:

“A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-Passing Systems,” ACM Computing Surveys, volume 34, number 3, pages 375–408, September 2002. doi:

10.1145/568522.568525

[100] Adam Warski: “Kafka Streams – How Does It Fit the Stream Processing Land‐

scape? ,” softwaremill.com, June 1, 2016.

Summary | 487

CHAPTER 12

The Future of Data Systems

If a thing be ordained to another as to its end, its last end cannot consist in the preservation

of its being. Hence a captain does not intend as a last end, the preservation of the ship

entrusted to him, since a ship is ordained to something else as its end, viz. to navigation.

(Often quoted as: If the highest aim of a captain was the preserve his ship, he would keep it

in port forever.)

—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

So far, this book has been mostly about describing things as they are at present. In

this final chapter, we will shift our perspective toward the future and discuss how

things should be: I will propose some ideas and approaches that, I believe, may funda‐

mentally improve the ways we design and build applications.

Opinions and speculation about the future are of course subjective, and so I will use

the first person in this chapter when writing about my personal opinions. You are

welcome to disagree with them and form your own opinions, but I hope that the

ideas in this chapter will at least be a starting point for a productive discussion and

bring some clarity to concepts that are often confused.

The goal of this book was outlined in Chapter 1: to explore how to create applications

and systems that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable. These themes have run

through all of the chapters: for example, we discussed many fault-tolerance algo‐

rithms that help improve reliability, partitioning to improve scalability, and mecha‐

nisms for evolution and abstraction that improve maintainability. In this chapter we

will bring all of these ideas together, and build on them to envisage the future. Our

goal is to discover how to design applications that are better than the ones of today—

robust, correct, evolvable, and ultimately beneficial to humanity.

489

Data Integration

A recurring theme in this book has been that for any given problem, there are several

solutions, all of which have different pros, cons, and trade-offs. For example, when

discussing storage engines in Chapter 3, we saw log-structured storage, B-trees, and

column-oriented storage. When discussing replication in Chapter 5, we saw single-

leader, multi-leader, and leaderless approaches.

If you have a problem such as “I want to store some data and look it up again later,”

there is no one right solution, but many different approaches that are each appropri‐

ate in different circumstances. A software implementation typically has to pick one

particular approach. It’s hard enough to get one code path robust and performing

well—trying to do everything in one piece of software almost guarantees that the

implementation will be poor.

Thus, the most appropriate choice of software tool also depends on the circumstan‐

ces. Every piece of software, even a so-called “general-purpose” database, is designed

for a particular usage pattern.

Faced with this profusion of alternatives, the first challenge is then to figure out the

mapping between the software products and the circumstances in which they are a

good fit. Vendors are understandably reluctant to tell you about the kinds of work‐

loads for which their software is poorly suited, but hopefully the previous chapters

have equipped you with some questions to ask in order to read between the lines and

better understand the trade-offs.

However, even if you perfectly understand the mapping between tools and circum‐

stances for their use, there is another challenge: in complex applications, data is often

used in several different ways. There is unlikely to be one piece of software that is

suitable for all the different circumstances in which the data is used, so you inevitably

end up having to cobble together several different pieces of software in order to pro‐

vide your application’s functionality.

Combining Specialized Tools by Deriving Data

For example, it is common to need to integrate an OLTP database with a full-text

search index in order to handle queries for arbitrary keywords. Although some data‐

bases (such as PostgreSQL) include a full-text indexing feature, which can be suffi‐

cient for simple applications [1], more sophisticated search facilities require specialist information retrieval tools. Conversely, search indexes are generally not very suitable as a durable system of record, and so many applications need to combine two differ‐

ent tools in order to satisfy all of the requirements.

We touched on the issue of integrating data systems in “Keeping Systems in Sync” on

page 452. As the number of different representations of the data increases, the inte‐

490 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

gration problem becomes harder. Besides the database and the search index, perhaps

you need to keep copies of the data in analytics systems (data warehouses, or batch

and stream processing systems); maintain caches or denormalized versions of objects

that were derived from the original data; pass the data through machine learning,

classification, ranking, or recommendation systems; or send notifications based on

changes to the data.

Surprisingly often I see software engineers make statements like, “In my experience,

99% of people only need X” or “…don’t need X” (for various values of X). I think that

such statements say more about the experience of the speaker than about the actual

usefulness of a technology. The range of different things you might want to do with

data is dizzyingly wide. What one person considers to be an obscure and pointless

feature may well be a central requirement for someone else. The need for data inte‐

gration often only becomes apparent if you zoom out and consider the dataflows

across an entire organization.

Reasoning about dataflows

When copies of the same data need to be maintained in several storage systems in

order to satisfy different access patterns, you need to be very clear about the inputs

and outputs: where is data written first, and which representations are derived from

which sources? How do you get data into all the right places, in the right formats?

For example, you might arrange for data to first be written to a system of record data‐

base, capturing the changes made to that database (see “Change Data Capture” on

page 454) and then applying the changes to the search index in the same order. If

change data capture (CDC) is the only way of updating the index, you can be confi‐

dent that the index is entirely derived from the system of record, and therefore con‐

sistent with it (barring bugs in the software). Writing to the database is the only way

of supplying new input into this system.

Allowing the application to directly write to both the search index and the database

introduces the problem shown in Figure 11-4, in which two clients concurrently send

conflicting writes, and the two storage systems process them in a different order. In

this case, neither the database nor the search index is “in charge” of determining the

order of writes, and so they may make contradictory decisions and become perma‐

nently inconsistent with each other.

If it is possible for you to funnel all user input through a single system that decides on

an ordering for all writes, it becomes much easier to derive other representations of

the data by processing the writes in the same order. This is an application of the state

machine replication approach that we saw in “Total Order Broadcast” on page 348.

Whether you use change data capture or an event sourcing log is less important than

simply the principle of deciding on a total order.

Data Integration | 491

Updating a derived data system based on an event log can often be made determinis‐

tic and idempotent (see “Idempotence” on page 478), making it quite easy to recover

from faults.

Derived data versus distributed transactions

The classic approach for keeping different data systems consistent with each other

involves distributed transactions, as discussed in “Atomic Commit and Two-Phase

Commit (2PC)” on page 354. How does the approach of using derived data systems

fare in comparison to distributed transactions?

At an abstract level, they achieve a similar goal by different means. Distributed trans‐

actions decide on an ordering of writes by using locks for mutual exclusion (see

“Two-Phase Locking (2PL)” on page 257), while CDC and event sourcing use a log

for ordering. Distributed transactions use atomic commit to ensure that changes take

effect exactly once, while log-based systems are often based on deterministic retry

and idempotence.

The biggest difference is that transaction systems usually provide linearizability (see

“Linearizability” on page 324), which implies useful guarantees such as reading your

own writes (see “Reading Your Own Writes” on page 162). On the other hand,

derived data systems are often updated asynchronously, and so they do not by default

offer the same timing guarantees.

Within limited environments that are willing to pay the cost of distributed transac‐

tions, they have been used successfully. However, I think that XA has poor fault toler‐

ance and performance characteristics (see “Distributed Transactions in Practice” on

page 360), which severely limit its usefulness. I believe that it might be possible to

create a better protocol for distributed transactions, but getting such a protocol

widely adopted and integrated with existing tools would be challenging, and unlikely

to happen soon.

In the absence of widespread support for a good distributed transaction protocol, I

believe that log-based derived data is the most promising approach for integrating

different data systems. However, guarantees such as reading your own writes are use‐

ful, and I don’t think that it is productive to tell everyone “eventual consistency is

inevitable—suck it up and learn to deal with it” (at least not without good guidance

on how to deal with it).

In “Aiming for Correctness” on page 515 we will discuss some approaches for imple‐

menting stronger guarantees on top of asynchronously derived systems, and work

toward a middle ground between distributed transactions and asynchronous log-

based systems.

492 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

The limits of total ordering

With systems that are small enough, constructing a totally ordered event log is

entirely feasible (as demonstrated by the popularity of databases with single-leader

replication, which construct precisely such a log). However, as systems are scaled

toward bigger and more complex workloads, limitations begin to emerge:

• In most cases, constructing a totally ordered log requires all events to pass

through a single leader node that decides on the ordering. If the throughput of

events is greater than a single machine can handle, you need to partition it across

multiple machines (see “Partitioned Logs” on page 446). The order of events in

two different partitions is then ambiguous.

• If the servers are spread across multiple geographically distributed datacenters,

for example in order to tolerate an entire datacenter going offline, you typically

have a separate leader in each datacenter, because network delays make synchro‐

nous cross-datacenter coordination inefficient (see “Multi-Leader Replication”

on page 168). This implies an undefined ordering of events that originate in two

different datacenters.

• When applications are deployed as microservices (see “Dataflow Through Serv‐

ices: REST and RPC” on page 131), a common design choice is to deploy each

service and its durable state as an independent unit, with no durable state shared

between services. When two events originate in different services, there is no

defined order for those events.

• Some applications maintain client-side state that is updated immediately on user

input (without waiting for confirmation from a server), and even continue to

work offline (see “Clients with offline operation” on page 170). With such appli‐

cations, clients and servers are very likely to see events in different orders.

In formal terms, deciding on a total order of events is known as total order broadcast,

which is equivalent to consensus (see “Consensus algorithms and total order broad‐

cast” on page 366). Most consensus algorithms are designed for situations in which

the throughput of a single node is sufficient to process the entire stream of events,

and these algorithms do not provide a mechanism for multiple nodes to share the

work of ordering the events. It is still an open research problem to design consensus

algorithms that can scale beyond the throughput of a single node and that work well

in a geographically distributed setting.

Ordering events to capture causality

In cases where there is no causal link between events, the lack of a total order is not a

big problem, since concurrent events can be ordered arbitrarily. Some other cases are

easy to handle: for example, when there are multiple updates of the same object, they

can be totally ordered by routing all updates for a particular object ID to the same log

Data Integration | 493

partition. However, causal dependencies sometimes arise in more subtle ways (see

also “Ordering and Causality” on page 339).

For example, consider a social networking service, and two users who were in a rela‐

tionship but have just broken up. One of the users removes the other as a friend, and

then sends a message to their remaining friends complaining about their ex-partner.

The user’s intention is that their ex-partner should not see the rude message, since

the message was sent after the friend status was revoked.

However, in a system that stores friendship status in one place and messages in

another place, that ordering dependency between the unfriend event and the message-

send event may be lost. If the causal dependency is not captured, a service that sends

notifications about new messages may process the message-send event before the

unfriend event, and thus incorrectly send a notification to the ex-partner.

In this example, the notifications are effectively a join between the messages and the

friend list, making it related to the timing issues of joins that we discussed previously

(see “Time-dependence of joins” on page 475). Unfortunately, there does not seem to

be a simple answer to this problem [2, 3]. Starting points include:

• Logical timestamps can provide total ordering without coordination (see

“Sequence Number Ordering” on page 343), so they may help in cases where

total order broadcast is not feasible. However, they still require recipients to han‐

dle events that are delivered out of order, and they require additional metadata to

be passed around.

• If you can log an event to record the state of the system that the user saw before

making a decision, and give that event a unique identifier, then any later events

can reference that event identifier in order to record the causal dependency [4].

We will return to this idea in “Reads are events too” on page 513.

• Conflict resolution algorithms (see “Automatic Conflict Resolution” on page

174) help with processing events that are delivered in an unexpected order. They

are useful for maintaining state, but they do not help if actions have external side

effects (such as sending a notification to a user).

Perhaps, over time, patterns for application development will emerge that allow

causal dependencies to be captured efficiently, and derived state to be maintained

correctly, without forcing all events to go through the bottleneck of total order

broadcast.

Batch and Stream Processing

I would say that the goal of data integration is to make sure that data ends up in the

right form in all the right places. Doing so requires consuming inputs, transforming,

joining, filtering, aggregating, training models, evaluating, and eventually writing to

494 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

the appropriate outputs. Batch and stream processors are the tools for achieving this

goal.

The outputs of batch and stream processes are derived datasets such as search

indexes, materialized views, recommendations to show to users, aggregate metrics,

and so on (see “The Output of Batch Workflows” on page 411 and “Uses of Stream

Processing” on page 465).

As we saw in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11, batch and stream processing have a lot of

principles in common, and the main fundamental difference is that stream process‐

ors operate on unbounded datasets whereas batch process inputs are of a known,

finite size. There are also many detailed differences in the ways the processing

engines are implemented, but these distinctions are beginning to blur.

Spark performs stream processing on top of a batch processing engine by breaking

the stream into microbatches, whereas Apache Flink performs batch processing on

top of a stream processing engine [5]. In principle, one type of processing can be

emulated on top of the other, although the performance characteristics vary: for

example, microbatching may perform poorly on hopping or sliding windows [6].

Maintaining derived state

Batch processing has a quite strong functional flavor (even if the code is not written

in a functional programming language): it encourages deterministic, pure functions

whose output depends only on the input and which have no side effects other than

the explicit outputs, treating inputs as immutable and outputs as append-only.

Stream processing is similar, but it extends operators to allow managed, fault-tolerant

state (see “Rebuilding state after a failure” on page 478).

The principle of deterministic functions with well-defined inputs and outputs is not

only good for fault tolerance (see “Idempotence” on page 478), but also simplifies

reasoning about the dataflows in an organization [7]. No matter whether the derived

data is a search index, a statistical model, or a cache, it is helpful to think in terms of

data pipelines that derive one thing from another, pushing state changes in one sys‐

tem through functional application code and applying the effects to derived systems.

In principle, derived data systems could be maintained synchronously, just like a

relational database updates secondary indexes synchronously within the same trans‐

action as writes to the table being indexed. However, asynchrony is what makes sys‐

tems based on event logs robust: it allows a fault in one part of the system to be

contained locally, whereas distributed transactions abort if any one participant fails,

so they tend to amplify failures by spreading them to the rest of the system (see “Lim‐

itations of distributed transactions” on page 363).

We saw in “Partitioning and Secondary Indexes” on page 206 that secondary indexes

often cross partition boundaries. A partitioned system with secondary indexes either

Data Integration | 495

needs to send writes to multiple partitions (if the index is term-partitioned) or send

reads to all partitions (if the index is document-partitioned). Such cross-partition

communication is also most reliable and scalable if the index is maintained asynchro‐

nously [8] (see also “Multi-partition data processing” on page 514).

Reprocessing data for application evolution

When maintaining derived data, batch and stream processing are both useful. Stream

processing allows changes in the input to be reflected in derived views with low delay,

whereas batch processing allows large amounts of accumulated historical data to be

reprocessed in order to derive new views onto an existing dataset.

In particular, reprocessing existing data provides a good mechanism for maintaining

a system, evolving it to support new features and changed requirements (see Chap‐

ter 4). Without reprocessing, schema evolution is limited to simple changes like

adding a new optional field to a record, or adding a new type of record. This is the

case both in a schema-on-write and in a schema-on-read context (see “Schema flexi‐

bility in the document model” on page 39). On the other hand, with reprocessing it is

possible to restructure a dataset into a completely different model in order to better

serve new requirements.

Schema Migrations on Railways

Large-scale “schema migrations” occur in noncomputer systems as well. For example,

in the early days of railway building in 19th-century England there were various com‐

peting standards for the gauge (the distance between the two rails). Trains built for

one gauge couldn’t run on tracks of another gauge, which restricted the possible

interconnections in the train network [9].

After a single standard gauge was finally decided upon in 1846, tracks with other

gauges had to be converted—but how do you do this without shutting down the train

line for months or years? The solution is to first convert the track to dual gauge or

mixed gauge by adding a third rail. This conversion can be done gradually, and when

it is done, trains of both gauges can run on the line, using two of the three rails. Even‐

tually, once all trains have been converted to the standard gauge, the rail providing

the nonstandard gauge can be removed.

“Reprocessing” the existing tracks in this way, and allowing the old and new versions

to exist side by side, makes it possible to change the gauge gradually over the course

of years. Nevertheless, it is an expensive undertaking, which is why nonstandard

gauges still exist today. For example, the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area

uses a different gauge from the majority of the US.

496 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Derived views allow gradual evolution. If you want to restructure a dataset, you do not need to perform the migration as a sudden switch. Instead, you can maintain the old schema and the new schema side by side as two independently derived views onto

the same underlying data. You can then start shifting a small number of users to the

new view in order to test its performance and find any bugs, while most users con‐

tinue to be routed to the old view. Gradually, you can increase the proportion of

users accessing the new view, and eventually you can drop the old view [10].

The beauty of such a gradual migration is that every stage of the process is easily

reversible if something goes wrong: you always have a working system to go back to.

By reducing the risk of irreversible damage, you can be more confident about going

ahead, and thus move faster to improve your system [11].

The lambda architecture

If batch processing is used to reprocess historical data, and stream processing is used

to process recent updates, then how do you combine the two? The lambda architec‐

ture [12] is a proposal in this area that has gained a lot of attention.

The core idea of the lambda architecture is that incoming data should be recorded by

appending immutable events to an always-growing dataset, similarly to event sourc‐

ing (see “Event Sourcing” on page 457). From these events, read-optimized views are

derived. The lambda architecture proposes running two different systems in parallel:

a batch processing system such as Hadoop MapReduce, and a separate stream-

processing system such as Storm.

In the lambda approach, the stream processor consumes the events and quickly pro‐

duces an approximate update to the view; the batch processor later consumes the

same set of events and produces a corrected version of the derived view. The reason‐

ing behind this design is that batch processing is simpler and thus less prone to bugs,

while stream processors are thought to be less reliable and harder to make fault-

tolerant (see “Fault Tolerance” on page 476). Moreover, the stream process can use

fast approximate algorithms while the batch process uses slower exact algorithms.

The lambda architecture was an influential idea that shaped the design of data sys‐

tems for the better, particularly by popularizing the principle of deriving views onto

streams of immutable events and reprocessing events when needed. However, I also

think that it has a number of practical problems:

• Having to maintain the same logic to run both in a batch and in a stream pro‐

cessing framework is significant additional effort. Although libraries such as

Summingbird [13] provide an abstraction for computations that can be run in

either a batch or a streaming context, the operational complexity of debugging,

tuning, and maintaining two different systems remains [14].

Data Integration | 497

• Since the stream pipeline and the batch pipeline produce separate outputs, they

need to be merged in order to respond to user requests. This merge is fairly easy

if the computation is a simple aggregation over a tumbling window, but it

becomes significantly harder if the view is derived using more complex opera‐

tions such as joins and sessionization, or if the output is not a time series.

• Although it is great to have the ability to reprocess the entire historical dataset,

doing so frequently is expensive on large datasets. Thus, the batch pipeline often

needs to be set up to process incremental batches (e.g., an hour’s worth of data at

the end of every hour) rather than reprocessing everything. This raises the prob‐

lems discussed in “Reasoning About Time” on page 468, such as handling strag‐

glers and handling windows that cross boundaries between batches.

Incrementalizing a batch computation adds complexity, making it more akin to

the streaming layer, which runs counter to the goal of keeping the batch layer as

simple as possible.

Unifying batch and stream processing

More recent work has enabled the benefits of the lambda architecture to be enjoyed

without its downsides, by allowing both batch computations (reprocessing historical

data) and stream computations (processing events as they arrive) to be implemented

in the same system [15].

Unifying batch and stream processing in one system requires the following features,

which are becoming increasingly widely available:

• The ability to replay historical events through the same processing engine that

handles the stream of recent events. For example, log-based message brokers

have the ability to replay messages (see “Replaying old messages” on page 451),

and some stream processors can read input from a distributed filesystem like

HDFS.

• Exactly-once semantics for stream processors—that is, ensuring that the output

is the same as if no faults had occurred, even if faults did in fact occur (see “Fault

Tolerance” on page 476). Like with batch processing, this requires discarding the

partial output of any failed tasks.

• Tools for windowing by event time, not by processing time, since processing

time is meaningless when reprocessing historical events (see “Reasoning About

Time” on page 468). For example, Apache Beam provides an API for expressing

such computations, which can then be run using Apache Flink or Google Cloud

Dataflow.

498 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Unbundling Databases

At a most abstract level, databases, Hadoop, and operating systems all perform the

same functions: they store some data, and they allow you to process and query that

data [16]. A database stores data in records of some data model (rows in tables, docu‐

ments, vertices in a graph, etc.) while an operating system’s filesystem stores data in

files—but at their core, both are “information management” systems [17]. As we saw

in Chapter 10, the Hadoop ecosystem is somewhat like a distributed version of Unix.

Of course, there are many practical differences. For example, many filesystems do not

cope very well with a directory containing 10 million small files, whereas a database

containing 10 million small records is completely normal and unremarkable. Never‐

theless, the similarities and differences between operating systems and databases are

worth exploring.

Unix and relational databases have approached the information management prob‐

lem with very different philosophies. Unix viewed its purpose as presenting program‐

mers with a logical but fairly low-level hardware abstraction, whereas relational

databases wanted to give application programmers a high-level abstraction that

would hide the complexities of data structures on disk, concurrency, crash recovery,

and so on. Unix developed pipes and files that are just sequences of bytes, whereas

databases developed SQL and transactions.

Which approach is better? Of course, it depends what you want. Unix is “simpler” in

the sense that it is a fairly thin wrapper around hardware resources; relational data‐

bases are “simpler” in the sense that a short declarative query can draw on a lot of

powerful infrastructure (query optimization, indexes, join methods, concurrency

control, replication, etc.) without the author of the query needing to understand the

implementation details.

The tension between these philosophies has lasted for decades (both Unix and the

relational model emerged in the early 1970s) and still isn’t resolved. For example, I

would interpret the NoSQL movement as wanting to apply a Unix-esque approach of

low-level abstractions to the domain of distributed OLTP data storage.

In this section I will attempt to reconcile the two philosophies, in the hope that we

can combine the best of both worlds.

Composing Data Storage Technologies

Over the course of this book we have discussed various features provided by data‐

bases and how they work, including:

• Secondary indexes, which allow you to efficiently search for records based on the

value of a field (see “Other Indexing Structures” on page 85)

Unbundling Databases | 499

• Materialized views, which are a kind of precomputed cache of query results (see

“Aggregation: Data Cubes and Materialized Views” on page 101)

• Replication logs, which keep copies of the data on other nodes up to date (see

“Implementation of Replication Logs” on page 158)

• Full-text search indexes, which allow keyword search in text (see “Full-text

search and fuzzy indexes” on page 88) and which are built into some relational

databases [1]

In Chapters 10 and 11, similar themes emerged. We talked about building full-text

search indexes (see “The Output of Batch Workflows” on page 411), about material‐

ized view maintenance (see “Maintaining materialized views” on page 467), and

about replicating changes from a database to derived data systems (see “Change Data

Capture” on page 454).

It seems that there are parallels between the features that are built into databases and

the derived data systems that people are building with batch and stream processors.

Creating an index

Think about what happens when you run CREATE INDEX to create a new index in a

relational database. The database has to scan over a consistent snapshot of a table,

pick out all of the field values being indexed, sort them, and write out the index. Then

it must process the backlog of writes that have been made since the consistent snap‐

shot was taken (assuming the table was not locked while creating the index, so writes

could continue). Once that is done, the database must continue to keep the index up

to date whenever a transaction writes to the table.

This process is remarkably similar to setting up a new follower replica (see “Setting

Up New Followers” on page 155), and also very similar to bootstrapping change data

capture in a streaming system (see “Initial snapshot” on page 455).

Whenever you run CREATE INDEX, the database essentially reprocesses the existing

dataset (as discussed in “Reprocessing data for application evolution” on page 496)

and derives the index as a new view onto the existing data. The existing data may be a

snapshot of the state rather than a log of all changes that ever happened, but the two

are closely related (see “State, Streams, and Immutability” on page 459).

The meta-database of everything

In this light, I think that the dataflow across an entire organization starts looking like

one huge database [7]. Whenever a batch, stream, or ETL process transports data

from one place and form to another place and form, it is acting like the database sub‐

system that keeps indexes or materialized views up to date.

500 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Viewed like this, batch and stream processors are like elaborate implementations of

triggers, stored procedures, and materialized view maintenance routines. The derived

data systems they maintain are like different index types. For example, a relational

database may support B-tree indexes, hash indexes, spatial indexes (see “Multi-

column indexes” on page 87), and other types of indexes. In the emerging architec‐

ture of derived data systems, instead of implementing those facilities as features of a

single integrated database product, they are provided by various different pieces of

software, running on different machines, administered by different teams.

Where will these developments take us in the future? If we start from the premise

that there is no single data model or storage format that is suitable for all access pat‐

terns, I speculate that there are two avenues by which different storage and process‐

ing tools can nevertheless be composed into a cohesive system:

Federated databases: unifying reads

It is possible to provide a unified query interface to a wide variety of underlying

storage engines and processing methods—an approach known as a federated

database or polystore [18, 19]. For example, PostgreSQL’s foreign data wrapper feature fits this pattern [20]. Applications that need a specialized data model or

query interface can still access the underlying storage engines directly, while

users who want to combine data from disparate places can do so easily through

the federated interface.

A federated query interface follows the relational tradition of a single integrated

system with a high-level query language and elegant semantics, but a compli‐

cated implementation.

Unbundled databases: unifying writes

While federation addresses read-only querying across several different systems, it

does not have a good answer to synchronizing writes across those systems. We

said that within a single database, creating a consistent index is a built-in feature.

When we compose several storage systems, we similarly need to ensure that all

data changes end up in all the right places, even in the face of faults. Making it

easier to reliably plug together storage systems (e.g., through change data capture

and event logs) is like unbundling a database’s index-maintenance features in a

way that can synchronize writes across disparate technologies [7, 21].

The unbundled approach follows the Unix tradition of small tools that do one

thing well [22], that communicate through a uniform low-level API (pipes), and

that can be composed using a higher-level language (the shell) [16].

Making unbundling work

Federation and unbundling are two sides of the same coin: composing a reliable, scal‐

able, and maintainable system out of diverse components. Federated read-only

Unbundling Databases | 501

querying requires mapping one data model into another, which takes some thought

but is ultimately quite a manageable problem. I think that keeping the writes to sev‐

eral storage systems in sync is the harder engineering problem, and so I will focus

on it.

The traditional approach to synchronizing writes requires distributed transactions

across heterogeneous storage systems [18], which I think is the wrong solution (see

“Derived data versus distributed transactions” on page 492). Transactions within a

single storage or stream processing system are feasible, but when data crosses the

boundary between different technologies, I believe that an asynchronous event log

with idempotent writes is a much more robust and practical approach.

For example, distributed transactions are used within some stream processors to ach‐

ieve exactly-once semantics (see “Atomic commit revisited” on page 477), and this

can work quite well. However, when a transaction would need to involve systems

written by different groups of people (e.g., when data is written from a stream pro‐

cessor to a distributed key-value store or search index), the lack of a standardized

transaction protocol makes integration much harder. An ordered log of events with

idempotent consumers (see “Idempotence” on page 478) is a much simpler abstrac‐

tion, and thus much more feasible to implement across heterogeneous systems [7].

The big advantage of log-based integration is loose coupling between the various com‐

ponents, which manifests itself in two ways:

1. At a system level, asynchronous event streams make the system as a whole more

robust to outages or performance degradation of individual components. If a

consumer runs slow or fails, the event log can buffer messages (see “Disk space

usage” on page 450), allowing the producer and any other consumers to continue

running unaffected. The faulty consumer can catch up when it is fixed, so it

doesn’t miss any data, and the fault is contained. By contrast, the synchronous

interaction of distributed transactions tends to escalate local faults into large-

scale failures (see “Limitations of distributed transactions” on page 363).

2. At a human level, unbundling data systems allows different software components

and services to be developed, improved, and maintained independently from

each other by different teams. Specialization allows each team to focus on doing

one thing well, with well-defined interfaces to other teams’ systems. Event logs

provide an interface that is powerful enough to capture fairly strong consistency

properties (due to durability and ordering of events), but also general enough to

be applicable to almost any kind of data.

Unbundled versus integrated systems

If unbundling does indeed become the way of the future, it will not replace databases

in their current form—they will still be needed as much as ever. Databases are still

502 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

required for maintaining state in stream processors, and in order to serve queries for

the output of batch and stream processors (see “The Output of Batch Workflows” on

page 411 and “Processing Streams” on page 464). Specialized query engines will continue to be important for particular workloads: for example, query engines in MPP

data warehouses are optimized for exploratory analytic queries and handle this kind

of workload very well (see “Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases” on page

414).

The complexity of running several different pieces of infrastructure can be a problem:

each piece of software has a learning curve, configuration issues, and operational

quirks, and so it is worth deploying as few moving parts as possible. A single integra‐

ted software product may also be able to achieve better and more predictable perfor‐

mance on the kinds of workloads for which it is designed, compared to a system

consisting of several tools that you have composed with application code [23]. As I

said in the Preface, building for scale that you don’t need is wasted effort and may

lock you into an inflexible design. In effect, it is a form of premature optimization.

The goal of unbundling is not to compete with individual databases on performance

for particular workloads; the goal is to allow you to combine several different data‐

bases in order to achieve good performance for a much wider range of workloads

than is possible with a single piece of software. It’s about breadth, not depth—in the

same vein as the diversity of storage and processing models that we discussed in

“Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases” on page 414.

Thus, if there is a single technology that does everything you need, you’re most likely

best off simply using that product rather than trying to reimplement it yourself from

lower-level components. The advantages of unbundling and composition only come

into the picture when there is no single piece of software that satisfies all your

requirements.

What’s missing?

The tools for composing data systems are getting better, but I think one major part is

missing: we don’t yet have the unbundled-database equivalent of the Unix shell (i.e., a

high-level language for composing storage and processing systems in a simple and

declarative way).

For example, I would love it if we could simply declare mysql | elasticsearch, by

analogy to Unix pipes [22], which would be the unbundled equivalent of CREATE

INDEX: it would take all the documents in a MySQL database and index them in an

Elasticsearch cluster. It would then continually capture all the changes made to the

database and automatically apply them to the search index, without us having to

write custom application code. This kind of integration should be possible with

almost any kind of storage or indexing system.

Unbundling Databases | 503

Similarly, it would be great to be able to precompute and update caches more easily.

Recall that a materialized view is essentially a precomputed cache, so you could imag‐

ine creating a cache by declaratively specifying materialized views for complex quer‐

ies, including recursive queries on graphs (see “Graph-Like Data Models” on page

49) and application logic. There is interesting early-stage research in this area, such as differential dataflow [24, 25], and I hope that these ideas will find their way into production systems.

Designing Applications Around Dataflow

The approach of unbundling databases by composing specialized storage and pro‐

cessing systems with application code is also becoming known as the “database

inside-out” approach [26], after the title of a conference talk I gave in 2014 [27].

However, calling it a “new architecture” is too grandiose. I see it more as a design

pattern, a starting point for discussion, and we give it a name simply so that we can

better talk about it.

These ideas are not mine; they are simply an amalgamation of other people’s ideas

from which I think we should learn. In particular, there is a lot of overlap with data‐

flow languages such as Oz [28] and Juttle [29], functional reactive programming (FRP) languages such as Elm [30, 31], and logic programming languages such as Bloom [32].

The term unbundling in this context was proposed by Jay Kreps [7].

Even spreadsheets have dataflow programming capabilities that are miles ahead of

most mainstream programming languages [33]. In a spreadsheet, you can put a for‐

mula in one cell (for example, the sum of cells in another column), and whenever any

input to the formula changes, the result of the formula is automatically recalculated.

This is exactly what we want at a data system level: when a record in a database

changes, we want any index for that record to be automatically updated, and any

cached views or aggregations that depend on the record to be automatically

refreshed. You should not have to worry about the technical details of how this

refresh happens, but be able to simply trust that it works correctly.

Thus, I think that most data systems still have something to learn from the features

that VisiCalc already had in 1979 [34]. The difference from spreadsheets is that

today’s data systems need to be fault-tolerant, scalable, and store data durably. They

also need to be able to integrate disparate technologies written by different groups of

people over time, and reuse existing libraries and services: it is unrealistic to expect all

software to be developed using one particular language, framework, or tool.

In this section I will expand on these ideas and explore some ways of building appli‐

cations around the ideas of unbundled databases and dataflow.

504 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Application code as a derivation function

When one dataset is derived from another, it goes through some kind of transforma‐

tion function. For example:

• A secondary index is a kind of derived dataset with a straightforward transforma‐

tion function: for each row or document in the base table, it picks out the values

in the columns or fields being indexed, and sorts by those values (assuming a B-

tree or SSTable index, which are sorted by key, as discussed in Chapter 3).

• A full-text search index is created by applying various natural language process‐

ing functions such as language detection, word segmentation, stemming or lem‐

matization, spelling correction, and synonym identification, followed by building

a data structure for efficient lookups (such as an inverted index).

• In a machine learning system, we can consider the model as being derived from

the training data by applying various feature extraction and statistical analysis

functions. When the model is applied to new input data, the output of the model

is derived from the input and the model (and hence, indirectly, from the training

data).

• A cache often contains an aggregation of data in the form in which it is going to

be displayed in a user interface (UI). Populating the cache thus requires knowl‐

edge of what fields are referenced in the UI; changes in the UI may require

updating the definition of how the cache is populated and rebuilding the cache.

The derivation function for a secondary index is so commonly required that it is built

into many databases as a core feature, and you can invoke it by merely saying CREATE

INDEX. For full-text indexing, basic linguistic features for common languages may be

built into a database, but the more sophisticated features often require domain-

specific tuning. In machine learning, feature engineering is notoriously application-

specific, and often has to incorporate detailed knowledge about the user interaction

and deployment of an application [35].

When the function that creates a derived dataset is not a standard cookie-cutter func‐

tion like creating a secondary index, custom code is required to handle the

application-specific aspects. And this custom code is where many databases struggle.

Although relational databases commonly support triggers, stored procedures, and

user-defined functions, which can be used to execute application code within the

database, they have been somewhat of an afterthought in database design (see

“Transmitting Event Streams” on page 440).

Separation of application code and state

In theory, databases could be deployment environments for arbitrary application

code, like an operating system. However, in practice they have turned out to be

Unbundling Databases | 505

poorly suited for this purpose. They do not fit well with the requirements of modern

application development, such as dependency and package management, version

control, rolling upgrades, evolvability, monitoring, metrics, calls to network services,

and integration with external systems.

On the other hand, deployment and cluster management tools such as Mesos, YARN,

Docker, Kubernetes, and others are designed specifically for the purpose of running

application code. By focusing on doing one thing well, they are able to do it much

better than a database that provides execution of user-defined functions as one of its

many features.

I think it makes sense to have some parts of a system that specialize in durable data

storage, and other parts that specialize in running application code. The two can

interact while still remaining independent.

Most web applications today are deployed as stateless services, in which any user

request can be routed to any application server, and the server forgets everything

about the request once it has sent the response. This style of deployment is conve‐

nient, as servers can be added or removed at will, but the state has to go somewhere:

typically, a database. The trend has been to keep stateless application logic separate

from state management (databases): not putting application logic in the database and

not putting persistent state in the application [36]. As people in the functional pro‐

gramming community like to joke, “We believe in the separation of Church and

state” [37].i

In this typical web application model, the database acts as a kind of mutable shared

variable that can be accessed synchronously over the network. The application can

read and update the variable, and the database takes care of making it durable, pro‐

viding some concurrency control and fault tolerance.

However, in most programming languages you cannot subscribe to changes in a

mutable variable—you can only read it periodically. Unlike in a spreadsheet, readers

of the variable don’t get notified if the value of the variable changes. (You can imple‐

ment such notifications in your own code—this is known as the observer pattern—

but most languages do not have this pattern as a built-in feature.)

Databases have inherited this passive approach to mutable data: if you want to find

out whether the content of the database has changed, often your only option is to poll

(i.e., to repeat your query periodically). Subscribing to changes is only just beginning

to emerge as a feature (see “API support for change streams” on page 456).

i. Explaining a joke rarely improves it, but I don’t want anyone to feel left out. Here, Church is a reference to the mathematician Alonzo Church, who created the lambda calculus, an early form of computation that is the basis for most functional programming languages. The lambda calculus has no mutable state (i.e., no vari‐

ables that can be overwritten), so one could say that mutable state is separate from Church’s work.

506 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Dataflow: Interplay between state changes and application code

Thinking about applications in terms of dataflow implies renegotiating the relation‐

ship between application code and state management. Instead of treating a database

as a passive variable that is manipulated by the application, we think much more

about the interplay and collaboration between state, state changes, and code that pro‐

cesses them. Application code responds to state changes in one place by triggering

state changes in another place.

We saw this line of thinking in “Databases and Streams” on page 451, where we dis‐

cussed treating the log of changes to a database as a stream of events that we can sub‐

scribe to. Message-passing systems such as actors (see “Message-Passing Dataflow”

on page 136) also have this concept of responding to events. Already in the 1980s, the

tuple spaces model explored expressing distributed computations in terms of pro‐

cesses that observe state changes and react to them [38, 39].

As discussed, similar things happen inside a database when a trigger fires due to a

data change, or when a secondary index is updated to reflect a change in the table

being indexed. Unbundling the database means taking this idea and applying it to the

creation of derived datasets outside of the primary database: caches, full-text search

indexes, machine learning, or analytics systems. We can use stream processing and

messaging systems for this purpose.

The important thing to keep in mind is that maintaining derived data is not the same

as asynchronous job execution, for which messaging systems are traditionally

designed (see “Logs compared to traditional messaging” on page 448):

• When maintaining derived data, the order of state changes is often important (if

several views are derived from an event log, they need to process the events in the

same order so that they remain consistent with each other). As discussed in

“Acknowledgments and redelivery” on page 445, many message brokers do not

have this property when redelivering unacknowledged messages. Dual writes are

also ruled out (see “Keeping Systems in Sync” on page 452).

• Fault tolerance is key for derived data: losing just a single message causes the

derived dataset to go permanently out of sync with its data source. Both message

delivery and derived state updates must be reliable. For example, many actor sys‐

tems by default maintain actor state and messages in memory, so they are lost if

the machine running the actor crashes.

Stable message ordering and fault-tolerant message processing are quite stringent

demands, but they are much less expensive and more operationally robust than dis‐

tributed transactions. Modern stream processors can provide these ordering and reli‐

ability guarantees at scale, and they allow application code to be run as stream

operators.

Unbundling Databases | 507

This application code can do the arbitrary processing that built-in derivation func‐

tions in databases generally don’t provide. Like Unix tools chained by pipes, stream

operators can be composed to build large systems around dataflow. Each operator

takes streams of state changes as input, and produces other streams of state changes

as output.

Stream processors and services

The currently trendy style of application development involves breaking down func‐

tionality into a set of services that communicate via synchronous network requests

such as REST APIs (see “Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC” on page 131).

The advantage of such a service-oriented architecture over a single monolithic appli‐

cation is primarily organizational scalability through loose coupling: different teams

can work on different services, which reduces coordination effort between teams (as

long as the services can be deployed and updated independently).

Composing stream operators into dataflow systems has a lot of similar characteristics

to the microservices approach [40]. However, the underlying communication mecha‐

nism is very different: one-directional, asynchronous message streams rather than

synchronous request/response interactions.

Besides the advantages listed in “Message-Passing Dataflow” on page 136, such as

better fault tolerance, dataflow systems can also achieve better performance. For

example, say a customer is purchasing an item that is priced in one currency but paid

for in another currency. In order to perform the currency conversion, you need to

know the current exchange rate. This operation could be implemented in two ways

[40, 41]:

1. In the microservices approach, the code that processes the purchase would prob‐

ably query an exchange-rate service or database in order to obtain the current

rate for a particular currency.

2. In the dataflow approach, the code that processes purchases would subscribe to a

stream of exchange rate updates ahead of time, and record the current rate in a

local database whenever it changes. When it comes to processing the purchase, it

only needs to query the local database.

The second approach has replaced a synchronous network request to another service

with a query to a local database (which may be on the same machine, even in the

same process).ii Not only is the dataflow approach faster, but it is also more robust to

ii. In the microservices approach, you could avoid the synchronous network request by caching the exchange

rate locally in the service that processes the purchase. However, in order to keep that cache fresh, you would need to periodically poll for updated exchange rates, or subscribe to a stream of changes—which is exactly what happens in the dataflow approach.

508 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

the failure of another service. The fastest and most reliable network request is no net‐

work request at all! Instead of RPC, we now have a stream join between purchase

events and exchange rate update events (see “Stream-table join (stream enrichment)”

on page 473).

The join is time-dependent: if the purchase events are reprocessed at a later point in

time, the exchange rate will have changed. If you want to reconstruct the original out‐

put, you will need to obtain the historical exchange rate at the original time of pur‐

chase. No matter whether you query a service or subscribe to a stream of exchange

rate updates, you will need to handle this time dependence (see “Time-dependence of

joins” on page 475).

Subscribing to a stream of changes, rather than querying the current state when

needed, brings us closer to a spreadsheet-like model of computation: when some

piece of data changes, any derived data that depends on it can swiftly be updated.

There are still many open questions, for example around issues like time-dependent

joins, but I believe that building applications around dataflow ideas is a very promis‐

ing direction to go in.

Observing Derived State

At an abstract level, the dataflow systems discussed in the last section give you a pro‐

cess for creating derived datasets (such as search indexes, materialized views, and

predictive models) and keeping them up to date. Let’s call that process the write path:

whenever some piece of information is written to the system, it may go through mul‐

tiple stages of batch and stream processing, and eventually every derived dataset is

updated to incorporate the data that was written. Figure 12-1 shows an example of

updating a search index.

Figure 12-1. In a search index, writes (document updates) meet reads (queries).

But why do you create the derived dataset in the first place? Most likely because you

want to query it again at a later time. This is the read path: when serving a user

Unbundling Databases | 509

request you read from the derived dataset, perhaps perform some more processing

on the results, and construct the response to the user.

Taken together, the write path and the read path encompass the whole journey of the

data, from the point where it is collected to the point where it is consumed (probably

by another human). The write path is the portion of the journey that is precomputed

—i.e., that is done eagerly as soon as the data comes in, regardless of whether anyone

has asked to see it. The read path is the portion of the journey that only happens

when someone asks for it. If you are familiar with functional programming lan‐

guages, you might notice that the write path is similar to eager evaluation, and the

read path is similar to lazy evaluation.

The derived dataset is the place where the write path and the read path meet, as illus‐

trated in Figure 12-1. It represents a trade-off between the amount of work that needs

to be done at write time and the amount that needs to be done at read time.

Materialized views and caching

A full-text search index is a good example: the write path updates the index, and the

read path searches the index for keywords. Both reads and writes need to do some

work. Writes need to update the index entries for all terms that appear in the docu‐

ment. Reads need to search for each of the words in the query, and apply Boolean

logic to find documents that contain all of the words in the query (an AND operator),

or any synonym of each of the words (an OR operator).

If you didn’t have an index, a search query would have to scan over all documents

(like grep), which would get very expensive if you had a large number of documents.

No index means less work on the write path (no index to update), but a lot more

work on the read path.

On the other hand, you could imagine precomputing the search results for all possi‐

ble queries. In that case, you would have less work to do on the read path: no Boolean

logic, just find the results for your query and return them. However, the write path

would be a lot more expensive: the set of possible search queries that could be asked

is infinite, and thus precomputing all possible search results would require infinite

time and storage space. That wouldn’t work so well.iii

Another option would be to precompute the search results for only a fixed set of the

most common queries, so that they can be served quickly without having to go to the

index. The uncommon queries can still be served from the index. This would gener‐

ally be called a cache of common queries, although we could also call it a materialized

iii. Less facetiously, the set of distinct search queries with nonempty search results is finite, assuming a finite corpus. However, it would be exponential in the number of terms in the corpus, which is still pretty bad news.

510 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

view, as it would need to be updated when new documents appear that should be

included in the results of one of the common queries.

From this example we can see that an index is not the only possible boundary

between the write path and the read path. Caching of common search results is possi‐

ble, and grep-like scanning without the index is also possible on a small number of

documents. Viewed like this, the role of caches, indexes, and materialized views is

simple: they shift the boundary between the read path and the write path. They allow

us to do more work on the write path, by precomputing results, in order to save effort

on the read path.

Shifting the boundary between work done on the write path and the read path was in

fact the topic of the Twitter example at the beginning of this book, in “Describing

Load” on page 11. In that example, we also saw how the boundary between write path

and read path might be drawn differently for celebrities compared to ordinary users.

After 500 pages we have come full circle!

Stateful, offline-capable clients

I find the idea of a boundary between write and read paths interesting because we can

discuss shifting that boundary and explore what that shift means in practical terms.

Let’s look at the idea in a different context.

The huge popularity of web applications in the last two decades has led us to certain

assumptions about application development that are easy to take for granted. In par‐

ticular, the client/server model—in which clients are largely stateless and servers have

the authority over data—is so common that we almost forget that anything else

exists. However, technology keeps moving on, and I think it is important to question

the status quo from time to time.

Traditionally, web browsers have been stateless clients that can only do useful things

when you have an internet connection (just about the only thing you could do offline

was to scroll up and down in a page that you had previously loaded while online).

However, recent “single-page” JavaScript web apps have gained a lot of stateful capa‐

bilities, including client-side user interface interaction and persistent local storage in

the web browser. Mobile apps can similarly store a lot of state on the device and don’t

require a round-trip to the server for most user interactions.

These changing capabilities have led to a renewed interest in offline-first applications

that do as much as possible using a local database on the same device, without requir‐

ing an internet connection, and sync with remote servers in the background when a

network connection is available [42]. Since mobile devices often have slow and unre‐

liable cellular internet connections, it’s a big advantage for users if their user interface

does not have to wait for synchronous network requests, and if apps mostly work off‐

line (see “Clients with offline operation” on page 170).

Unbundling Databases | 511

When we move away from the assumption of stateless clients talking to a central

database and toward state that is maintained on end-user devices, a world of new

opportunities opens up. In particular, we can think of the on-device state as a cache of

state on the server. The pixels on the screen are a materialized view onto model

objects in the client app; the model objects are a local replica of state in a remote

datacenter [27].

Pushing state changes to clients

In a typical web page, if you load the page in a web browser and the data subse‐

quently changes on the server, the browser does not find out about the change until

you reload the page. The browser only reads the data at one point in time, assuming

that it is static—it does not subscribe to updates from the server. Thus, the state on

the device is a stale cache that is not updated unless you explicitly poll for changes.

(HTTP-based feed subscription protocols like RSS are really just a basic form of poll‐

ing.)

More recent protocols have moved beyond the basic request/response pattern of

HTTP: server-sent events (the EventSource API) and WebSockets provide communi‐

cation channels by which a web browser can keep an open TCP connection to a

server, and the server can actively push messages to the browser as long as it remains

connected. This provides an opportunity for the server to actively inform the end-

user client about any changes to the state it has stored locally, reducing the staleness

of the client-side state.

In terms of our model of write path and read path, actively pushing state changes all

the way to client devices means extending the write path all the way to the end user.

When a client is first initialized, it would still need to use a read path to get its initial

state, but thereafter it could rely on a stream of state changes sent by the server. The

ideas we discussed around stream processing and messaging are not restricted to run‐

ning only in a datacenter: we can take the ideas further, and extend them all the way

to end-user devices [43].

The devices will be offline some of the time, and unable to receive any notifications of

state changes from the server during that time. But we already solved that problem: in

“Consumer offsets” on page 449 we discussed how a consumer of a log-based mes‐

sage broker can reconnect after failing or becoming disconnected, and ensure that it

doesn’t miss any messages that arrived while it was disconnected. The same techni‐

que works for individual users, where each device is a small subscriber to a small

stream of events.

End-to-end event streams

Recent tools for developing stateful clients and user interfaces, such as the Elm lan‐

guage [30] and Facebook’s toolchain of React, Flux, and Redux [44], already manage 512 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems internal client-side state by subscribing to a stream of events representing user input

or responses from a server, structured similarly to event sourcing (see “Event Sourc‐

ing” on page 457).

It would be very natural to extend this programming model to also allow a server to

push state-change events into this client-side event pipeline. Thus, state changes

could flow through an end-to-end write path: from the interaction on one device that

triggers a state change, via event logs and through several derived data systems and

stream processors, all the way to the user interface of a person observing the state on

another device. These state changes could be propagated with fairly low delay—say,

under one second end to end.

Some applications, such as instant messaging and online games, already have such a

“real-time” architecture (in the sense of interactions with low delay, not in the sense

of “Response time guarantees” on page 298). But why don’t we build all applications

this way?

The challenge is that the assumption of stateless clients and request/response interac‐

tions is very deeply ingrained in our databases, libraries, frameworks, and protocols.

Many datastores support read and write operations where a request returns one

response, but much fewer provide an ability to subscribe to changes—i.e., a request

that returns a stream of responses over time (see “API support for change streams”

on page 456).

In order to extend the write path all the way to the end user, we would need to funda‐

mentally rethink the way we build many of these systems: moving away from request/

response interaction and toward publish/subscribe dataflow [27]. I think that the

advantages of more responsive user interfaces and better offline support would make

it worth the effort. If you are designing data systems, I hope that you will keep in

mind the option of subscribing to changes, not just querying the current state.

Reads are events too

We discussed that when a stream processor writes derived data to a store (database,

cache, or index), and when user requests query that store, the store acts as the bound‐

ary between the write path and the read path. The store allows random-access read

queries to the data that would otherwise require scanning the whole event log.

In many cases, the data storage is separate from the streaming system. But recall that

stream processors also need to maintain state to perform aggregations and joins (see

“Stream Joins” on page 472). This state is normally hidden inside the stream pro‐

cessor, but some frameworks allow it to also be queried by outside clients [45], turn‐

ing the stream processor itself into a kind of simple database.

I would like to take that idea further. As discussed so far, the writes to the store go

through an event log, while reads are transient network requests that go directly to

Unbundling Databases | 513

the nodes that store the data being queried. This is a reasonable design, but not the

only possible one. It is also possible to represent read requests as streams of events,

and send both the read events and the write events through a stream processor; the

processor responds to read events by emitting the result of the read to an output

stream [46].

When both the writes and the reads are represented as events, and routed to the same

stream operator in order to be handled, we are in fact performing a stream-table join

between the stream of read queries and the database. The read event needs to be sent

to the database partition holding the data (see “Request Routing” on page 214), just

like batch and stream processors need to copartition inputs on the same key when

joining (see “Reduce-Side Joins and Grouping” on page 403).

This correspondence between serving requests and performing joins is quite funda‐

mental [47]. A one-off read request just passes the request through the join operator

and then immediately forgets it; a subscribe request is a persistent join with past and

future events on the other side of the join.

Recording a log of read events potentially also has benefits with regard to tracking

causal dependencies and data provenance across a system: it would allow you to

reconstruct what the user saw before they made a particular decision. For example, in

an online shop, it is likely that the predicted shipping date and the inventory status

shown to a customer affect whether they choose to buy an item [4]. To analyze this

connection, you need to record the result of the user’s query of the shipping and

inventory status.

Writing read events to durable storage thus enables better tracking of causal depen‐

dencies (see “Ordering events to capture causality” on page 493), but it incurs addi‐

tional storage and I/O cost. Optimizing such systems to reduce the overhead is still

an open research problem [2]. But if you already log read requests for operational

purposes, as a side effect of request processing, it is not such a great change to make

the log the source of the requests instead.

Multi-partition data processing

For queries that only touch a single partition, the effort of sending queries through a

stream and collecting a stream of responses is perhaps overkill. However, this idea

opens the possibility of distributed execution of complex queries that need to com‐

bine data from several partitions, taking advantage of the infrastructure for message

routing, partitioning, and joining that is already provided by stream processors.

Storm’s distributed RPC feature supports this usage pattern (see “Message passing

and RPC” on page 468). For example, it has been used to compute the number of

people who have seen a URL on Twitter—i.e., the union of the follower sets of every‐

one who has tweeted that URL [48]. As the set of Twitter users is partitioned, this

computation requires combining results from many partitions.

514 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Another example of this pattern occurs in fraud prevention: in order to assess the risk

of whether a particular purchase event is fraudulent, you can examine the reputation

scores of the user’s IP address, email address, billing address, shipping address, and

so on. Each of these reputation databases is itself partitioned, and so collecting the

scores for a particular purchase event requires a sequence of joins with differently

partitioned datasets [49].

The internal query execution graphs of MPP databases have similar characteristics

(see “Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases” on page 414). If you need to per‐

form this kind of multi-partition join, it is probably simpler to use a database that

provides this feature than to implement it using a stream processor. However, treat‐

ing queries as streams provides an option for implementing large-scale applications

that run against the limits of conventional off-the-shelf solutions.

Aiming for Correctness

With stateless services that only read data, it is not a big deal if something goes

wrong: you can fix the bug and restart the service, and everything returns to normal.

Stateful systems such as databases are not so simple: they are designed to remember

things forever (more or less), so if something goes wrong, the effects also potentially

last forever—which means they require more careful thought [50].

We want to build applications that are reliable and correct (i.e., programs whose

semantics are well defined and understood, even in the face of various faults). For

approximately four decades, the transaction properties of atomicity, isolation, and

durability (Chapter 7) have been the tools of choice for building correct applications.

However, those foundations are weaker than they seem: witness for example the con‐

fusion of weak isolation levels (see “Weak Isolation Levels” on page 233).

In some areas, transactions are being abandoned entirely and replaced with models

that offer better performance and scalability, but much messier semantics (see for

example “Leaderless Replication” on page 177). Consistency is often talked about, but

poorly defined (see “Consistency” on page 224 and Chapter 9). Some people assert that we should “embrace weak consistency” for the sake of better availability, while lacking a clear idea of what that actually means in practice.

For a topic that is so important, our understanding and our engineering methods are

surprisingly flaky. For example, it is very difficult to determine whether it is safe to

run a particular application at a particular transaction isolation level or replication

configuration [51, 52]. Often simple solutions appear to work correctly when concur‐

rency is low and there are no faults, but turn out to have many subtle bugs in more

demanding circumstances.

For example, Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen experiments [53] have highlighted the stark

discrepancies between some products’ claimed safety guarantees and their actual

Aiming for Correctness | 515

behavior in the presence of network problems and crashes. Even if infrastructure

products like databases were free from problems, application code would still need to

correctly use the features they provide, which is error-prone if the configuration is

hard to understand (which is the case with weak isolation levels, quorum configura‐

tions, and so on).

If your application can tolerate occasionally corrupting or losing data in unpredicta‐

ble ways, life is a lot simpler, and you might be able to get away with simply crossing

your fingers and hoping for the best. On the other hand, if you need stronger assur‐

ances of correctness, then serializability and atomic commit are established

approaches, but they come at a cost: they typically only work in a single datacenter

(ruling out geographically distributed architectures), and they limit the scale and

fault-tolerance properties you can achieve.

While the traditional transaction approach is not going away, I also believe it is not

the last word in making applications correct and resilient to faults. In this section I

will suggest some ways of thinking about correctness in the context of dataflow archi‐

tectures.

The End-to-End Argument for Databases

Just because an application uses a data system that provides comparatively strong

safety properties, such as serializable transactions, that does not mean the application

is guaranteed to be free from data loss or corruption. For example, if an application

has a bug that causes it to write incorrect data, or delete data from a database, serial‐

izable transactions aren’t going to save you.

This example may seem frivolous, but it is worth taking seriously: application bugs

occur, and people make mistakes. I used this example in “State, Streams, and Immut‐

ability” on page 459 to argue in favor of immutable and append-only data, because it

is easier to recover from such mistakes if you remove the ability of faulty code to

destroy good data.

Although immutability is useful, it is not a cure-all by itself. Let’s look at a more sub‐

tle example of data corruption that can occur.

Exactly-once execution of an operation

In “Fault Tolerance” on page 476 we encountered an idea called exactly-once (or effectively-once) semantics. If something goes wrong while processing a message, you can either give up (drop the message—i.e., incur data loss) or try again. If you try

again, there is the risk that it actually succeeded the first time, but you just didn’t find

out about the success, and so the message ends up being processed twice.

Processing twice is a form of data corruption: it is undesirable to charge a customer

twice for the same service (billing them too much) or increment a counter twice

516 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

(overstating some metric). In this context, exactly-once means arranging the computation such that the final effect is the same as if no faults had occurred, even if the operation actually was retried due to some fault. We previously discussed a few

approaches for achieving this goal.

One of the most effective approaches is to make the operation idempotent (see

“Idempotence” on page 478); that is, to ensure that it has the same effect, no matter

whether it is executed once or multiple times. However, taking an operation that is

not naturally idempotent and making it idempotent requires some effort and care:

you may need to maintain some additional metadata (such as the set of operation IDs

that have updated a value), and ensure fencing when failing over from one node to

another (see “The leader and the lock” on page 301).

Duplicate suppression

The same pattern of needing to suppress duplicates occurs in many other places

besides stream processing. For example, TCP uses sequence numbers on packets to

put them in the correct order at the recipient, and to determine whether any packets

were lost or duplicated on the network. Any lost packets are retransmitted and any

duplicates are removed by the TCP stack before it hands the data to an application.

However, this duplicate suppression only works within the context of a single TCP

connection. Imagine the TCP connection is a client’s connection to a database, and it

is currently executing the transaction in Example 12-1. In many databases, a transac‐

tion is tied to a client connection (if the client sends several queries, the database

knows that they belong to the same transaction because they are sent on the same

TCP connection). If the client suffers a network interruption and connection timeout

after sending the COMMIT, but before hearing back from the database server, it does

not know whether the transaction has been committed or aborted (Figure 8-1).

Example 12-1. A nonidempotent transfer of money from one account to another

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance + 11.00 WHERE account_id = 1234;

UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance - 11.00 WHERE account_id = 4321;

COMMIT;

The client can reconnect to the database and retry the transaction, but now it is out‐

side of the scope of TCP duplicate suppression. Since the transaction in Example 12-1

is not idempotent, it could happen that $22 is transferred instead of the desired $11.

Thus, even though Example 12-1 is a standard example for transaction atomicity, it is

actually not correct, and real banks do not work like this [3].

Two-phase commit (see “Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)” on page

354) protocols break the 1:1 mapping between a TCP connection and a transaction,

since they must allow a transaction coordinator to reconnect to a database after a net‐

Aiming for Correctness | 517

work fault, and tell it whether to commit or abort an in-doubt transaction. Is this suf‐

ficient to ensure that the transaction will only be executed once? Unfortunately not.

Even if we can suppress duplicate transactions between the database client and

server, we still need to worry about the network between the end-user device and the

application server. For example, if the end-user client is a web browser, it probably

uses an HTTP POST request to submit an instruction to the server. Perhaps the user

is on a weak cellular data connection, and they succeed in sending the POST, but the

signal becomes too weak before they are able to receive the response from the server.

In this case, the user will probably be shown an error message, and they may retry

manually. Web browsers warn, “Are you sure you want to submit this form again?”—

and the user says yes, because they wanted the operation to happen. (The Post/Redi‐

rect/Get pattern [54] avoids this warning message in normal operation, but it doesn’t

help if the POST request times out.) From the web server’s point of view the retry is a

separate request, and from the database’s point of view it is a separate transaction.

The usual deduplication mechanisms don’t help.

Operation identifiers

To make the operation idempotent through several hops of network communication,

it is not sufficient to rely just on a transaction mechanism provided by a database—

you need to consider the end-to-end flow of the request.

For example, you could generate a unique identifier for an operation (such as a

UUID) and include it as a hidden form field in the client application, or calculate a

hash of all the relevant form fields to derive the operation ID [3]. If the web browser submits the POST request twice, the two requests will have the same operation ID.

You can then pass that operation ID all the way through to the database and check

that you only ever execute one operation with a given ID, as shown in Example 12-2.

Example 12-2. Suppressing duplicate requests using a unique ID

ALTER TABLE requests ADD UNIQUE (request_id);

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

INSERT INTO requests

(request_id, from_account, to_account, amount)

VALUES('0286FDB8-D7E1-423F-B40B-792B3608036C', 4321, 1234, 11.00);

UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance + 11.00 WHERE account_id = 1234;

UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance - 11.00 WHERE account_id = 4321;

COMMIT;

518 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Example 12-2 relies on a uniqueness constraint on the request_id column. If a transaction attempts to insert an ID that already exists, the INSERT fails and the transaction is aborted, preventing it from taking effect twice. Relational databases can generally maintain a uniqueness constraint correctly, even at weak isolation levels (whereas an application-level check-then-insert may fail under nonserializable isola‐

tion, as discussed in “Write Skew and Phantoms” on page 246).

Besides suppressing duplicate requests, the requests table in Example 12-2 acts as a

kind of event log, hinting in the direction of event sourcing (see “Event Sourcing” on

page 457). The updates to the account balances don’t actually have to happen in the

same transaction as the insertion of the event, since they are redundant and could be

derived from the request event in a downstream consumer—as long as the event is

processed exactly once, which can again be enforced using the request ID.

The end-to-end argument

This scenario of suppressing duplicate transactions is just one example of a more

general principle called the end-to-end argument, which was articulated by Saltzer,

Reed, and Clark in 1984 [55]:

The function in question can completely and correctly be implemented only with the

knowledge and help of the application standing at the endpoints of the communica‐

tion system. Therefore, providing that questioned function as a feature of the commu‐

nication system itself is not possible. (Sometimes an incomplete version of the function

provided by the communication system may be useful as a performance enhance‐

ment.)

In our example, the function in question was duplicate suppression. We saw that TCP

suppresses duplicate packets at the TCP connection level, and some stream process‐

ors provide so-called exactly-once semantics at the message processing level, but that

is not enough to prevent a user from submitting a duplicate request if the first one

times out. By themselves, TCP, database transactions, and stream processors cannot

entirely rule out these duplicates. Solving the problem requires an end-to-end solu‐

tion: a transaction identifier that is passed all the way from the end-user client to the

database.

The end-to-end argument also applies to checking the integrity of data: checksums

built into Ethernet, TCP, and TLS can detect corruption of packets in the network,

but they cannot detect corruption due to bugs in the software at the sending and

receiving ends of the network connection, or corruption on the disks where the data

is stored. If you want to catch all possible sources of data corruption, you also need

end-to-end checksums.

A similar argument applies with encryption [55]: the password on your home WiFi

network protects against people snooping your WiFi traffic, but not against attackers

elsewhere on the internet; TLS/SSL between your client and the server protects

Aiming for Correctness | 519

against network attackers, but not against compromises of the server. Only end-to-

end encryption and authentication can protect against all of these things.

Although the low-level features (TCP duplicate suppression, Ethernet checksums,

WiFi encryption) cannot provide the desired end-to-end features by themselves, they

are still useful, since they reduce the probability of problems at the higher levels. For

example, HTTP requests would often get mangled if we didn’t have TCP putting the

packets back in the right order. We just need to remember that the low-level reliabil‐

ity features are not by themselves sufficient to ensure end-to-end correctness.

Applying end-to-end thinking in data systems

This brings me back to my original thesis: just because an application uses a data sys‐

tem that provides comparatively strong safety properties, such as serializable transac‐

tions, that does not mean the application is guaranteed to be free from data loss or

corruption. The application itself needs to take end-to-end measures, such as dupli‐

cate suppression, as well.

That is a shame, because fault-tolerance mechanisms are hard to get right. Low-level

reliability mechanisms, such as those in TCP, work quite well, and so the remaining

higher-level faults occur fairly rarely. It would be really nice to wrap up the remain‐

ing high-level fault-tolerance machinery in an abstraction so that application code

needn’t worry about it—but I fear that we have not yet found the right abstraction.

Transactions have long been seen as a good abstraction, and I do believe that they are

useful. As discussed in the introduction to Chapter 7, they take a wide range of possi‐

ble issues (concurrent writes, constraint violations, crashes, network interruptions,

disk failures) and collapse them down to two possible outcomes: commit or abort.

That is a huge simplification of the programming model, but I fear that it is not

enough.

Transactions are expensive, especially when they involve heterogeneous storage tech‐

nologies (see “Distributed Transactions in Practice” on page 360). When we refuse to

use distributed transactions because they are too expensive, we end up having to

reimplement fault-tolerance mechanisms in application code. As numerous examples

throughout this book have shown, reasoning about concurrency and partial failure is

difficult and counterintuitive, and so I suspect that most application-level mecha‐

nisms do not work correctly. The consequence is lost or corrupted data.

For these reasons, I think it is worth exploring fault-tolerance abstractions that make

it easy to provide application-specific end-to-end correctness properties, but also

maintain good performance and good operational characteristics in a large-scale dis‐

tributed environment.

520 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Enforcing Constraints

Let’s think about correctness in the context of the ideas around unbundling databases

(“Unbundling Databases” on page 499). We saw that end-to-end duplicate suppres‐

sion can be achieved with a request ID that is passed all the way from the client to the

database that records the write. What about other kinds of constraints?

In particular, let’s focus on uniqueness constraints—such as the one we relied on in

Example 12-2. In “Constraints and uniqueness guarantees” on page 330 we saw sev‐

eral other examples of application features that need to enforce uniqueness: a user‐

name or email address must uniquely identify a user, a file storage service cannot

have more than one file with the same name, and two people cannot book the same

seat on a flight or in a theater.

Other kinds of constraints are very similar: for example, ensuring that an account

balance never goes negative, that you don’t sell more items than you have in stock in

the warehouse, or that a meeting room does not have overlapping bookings. Techni‐

ques that enforce uniqueness can often be used for these kinds of constraints as well.

Uniqueness constraints require consensus

In Chapter 9 we saw that in a distributed setting, enforcing a uniqueness constraint

requires consensus: if there are several concurrent requests with the same value, the

system somehow needs to decide which one of the conflicting operations is accepted,

and reject the others as violations of the constraint.

The most common way of achieving this consensus is to make a single node the

leader, and put it in charge of making all the decisions. That works fine as long as you

don’t mind funneling all requests through a single node (even if the client is on the

other side of the world), and as long as that node doesn’t fail. If you need to tolerate

the leader failing, you’re back at the consensus problem again (see “Single-leader rep‐

lication and consensus” on page 367).

Uniqueness checking can be scaled out by partitioning based on the value that needs

to be unique. For example, if you need to ensure uniqueness by request ID, as in

Example 12-2, you can ensure all requests with the same request ID are routed to the

same partition (see Chapter 6). If you need usernames to be unique, you can partition

by hash of username.

However, asynchronous multi-master replication is ruled out, because it could hap‐

pen that different masters concurrently accept conflicting writes, and thus the values

are no longer unique (see “Implementing Linearizable Systems” on page 332). If you

want to be able to immediately reject any writes that would violate the constraint,

synchronous coordination is unavoidable [56].

Aiming for Correctness | 521

Uniqueness in log-based messaging

The log ensures that all consumers see messages in the same order—a guarantee that

is formally known as total order broadcast and is equivalent to consensus (see “Total

Order Broadcast” on page 348). In the unbundled database approach with log-based

messaging, we can use a very similar approach to enforce uniqueness constraints.

A stream processor consumes all the messages in a log partition sequentially on a sin‐

gle thread (see “Logs compared to traditional messaging” on page 448). Thus, if the

log is partitioned based on the value that needs to be unique, a stream processor can

unambiguously and deterministically decide which one of several conflicting opera‐

tions came first. For example, in the case of several users trying to claim the same

username [57]:

1. Every request for a username is encoded as a message, and appended to a parti‐

tion determined by the hash of the username.

2. A stream processor sequentially reads the requests in the log, using a local data‐

base to keep track of which usernames are taken. For every request for a user‐

name that is available, it records the name as taken and emits a success message

to an output stream. For every request for a username that is already taken, it

emits a rejection message to an output stream.

3. The client that requested the username watches the output stream and waits for a

success or rejection message corresponding to its request.

This algorithm is basically the same as in “Implementing linearizable storage using

total order broadcast” on page 350. It scales easily to a large request throughput by

increasing the number of partitions, as each partition can be processed independ‐

ently.

The approach works not only for uniqueness constraints, but also for many other

kinds of constraints. Its fundamental principle is that any writes that may conflict are

routed to the same partition and processed sequentially. As discussed in “What is a

conflict?” on page 174 and “Write Skew and Phantoms” on page 246, the definition of

a conflict may depend on the application, but the stream processor can use arbitrary

logic to validate a request. This idea is similar to the approach pioneered by Bayou in

the 1990s [58].

Multi-partition request processing

Ensuring that an operation is executed atomically, while satisfying constraints,

becomes more interesting when several partitions are involved. In Example 12-2,

there are potentially three partitions: the one containing the request ID, the one con‐

taining the payee account, and the one containing the payer account. There is no rea‐

522 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

son why those three things should be in the same partition, since they are all

independent from each other.

In the traditional approach to databases, executing this transaction would require an

atomic commit across all three partitions, which essentially forces it into a total order

with respect to all other transactions on any of those partitions. Since there is now

cross-partition coordination, different partitions can no longer be processed inde‐

pendently, so throughput is likely to suffer.

However, it turns out that equivalent correctness can be achieved with partitioned

logs, and without an atomic commit:

1. The request to transfer money from account A to account B is given a unique

request ID by the client, and appended to a log partition based on the request ID.

2. A stream processor reads the log of requests. For each request message it emits

two messages to output streams: a debit instruction to the payer account A (par‐

titioned by A), and a credit instruction to the payee account B (partitioned by B).

The original request ID is included in those emitted messages.

3. Further processors consume the streams of credit and debit instructions, dedu‐

plicate by request ID, and apply the changes to the account balances.

Steps 1 and 2 are necessary because if the client directly sent the credit and debit

instructions, it would require an atomic commit across those two partitions to ensure

that either both or neither happen. To avoid the need for a distributed transaction,

we first durably log the request as a single message, and then derive the credit and

debit instructions from that first message. Single-object writes are atomic in almost

all data systems (see “Single-object writes” on page 230), and so the request either

appears in the log or it doesn’t, without any need for a multi-partition atomic com‐

mit.

If the stream processor in step 2 crashes, it resumes processing from its last check‐

point. In doing so, it does not skip any request messages, but it may process requests

multiple times and produce duplicate credit and debit instructions. However, since it

is deterministic, it will just produce the same instructions again, and the processors in

step 3 can easily deduplicate them using the end-to-end request ID.

If you want to ensure that the payer account is not overdrawn by this transfer, you

can additionally have a stream processor (partitioned by payer account number) that

maintains account balances and validates transactions. Only valid transactions would

then be placed in the request log in step 1.

By breaking down the multi-partition transaction into two differently partitioned

stages and using the end-to-end request ID, we have achieved the same correctness

property (every request is applied exactly once to both the payer and payee accounts),

even in the presence of faults, and without using an atomic commit protocol. The

Aiming for Correctness | 523

idea of using multiple differently partitioned stages is similar to what we discussed in

“Multi-partition data processing” on page 514 (see also “Concurrency control” on

page 462).

Timeliness and Integrity

A convenient property of transactions is that they are typically linearizable (see “Lin‐

earizability” on page 324): that is, a writer waits until a transaction is committed, and thereafter its writes are immediately visible to all readers.

This is not the case when unbundling an operation across multiple stages of stream

processors: consumers of a log are asynchronous by design, so a sender does not wait

until its message has been processed by consumers. However, it is possible for a client

to wait for a message to appear on an output stream. This is what we did in “Unique‐

ness in log-based messaging” on page 522 when checking whether a uniqueness con‐

straint was satisfied.

In this example, the correctness of the uniqueness check does not depend on whether

the sender of the message waits for the outcome. The waiting only has the purpose of

synchronously informing the sender whether or not the uniqueness check succeeded,

but this notification can be decoupled from the effects of processing the message.

More generally, I think the term consistency conflates two different requirements that

are worth considering separately:

Timeliness

Timeliness means ensuring that users observe the system in an up-to-date state.

We saw previously that if a user reads from a stale copy of the data, they may

observe it in an inconsistent state (see “Problems with Replication Lag” on page

161). However, that inconsistency is temporary, and will eventually be resolved

simply by waiting and trying again.

The CAP theorem (see “The Cost of Linearizability” on page 335) uses consis‐

tency in the sense of linearizability, which is a strong way of achieving timeliness.

Weaker timeliness properties like read-after-write consistency (see “Reading

Your Own Writes” on page 162) can also be useful.

Integrity

Integrity means absence of corruption; i.e., no data loss, and no contradictory or

false data. In particular, if some derived dataset is maintained as a view onto

some underlying data (see “Deriving current state from the event log” on page

458), the derivation must be correct. For example, a database index must cor‐

rectly reflect the contents of the database—an index in which some records are

missing is not very useful.

524 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

If integrity is violated, the inconsistency is permanent: waiting and trying again is

not going to fix database corruption in most cases. Instead, explicit checking and

repair is needed. In the context of ACID transactions (see “The Meaning of

ACID” on page 223), consistency is usually understood as some kind of

application-specific notion of integrity. Atomicity and durability are important

tools for preserving integrity.

In slogan form: violations of timeliness are “eventual consistency,” whereas violations

of integrity are “perpetual inconsistency.”

I am going to assert that in most applications, integrity is much more important than

timeliness. Violations of timeliness can be annoying and confusing, but violations of

integrity can be catastrophic.

For example, on your credit card statement, it is not surprising if a transaction that

you made within the last 24 hours does not yet appear—it is normal that these sys‐

tems have a certain lag. We know that banks reconcile and settle transactions asyn‐

chronously, and timeliness is not very important here [3]. However, it would be very

bad if the statement balance was not equal to the sum of the transactions plus the

previous statement balance (an error in the sums), or if a transaction was charged to

you but not paid to the merchant (disappearing money). Such problems would be

violations of the integrity of the system.

Correctness of dataflow systems

ACID transactions usually provide both timeliness (e.g., linearizability) and integrity

(e.g., atomic commit) guarantees. Thus, if you approach application correctness from

the point of view of ACID transactions, the distinction between timeliness and integ‐

rity is fairly inconsequential.

On the other hand, an interesting property of the event-based dataflow systems that

we have discussed in this chapter is that they decouple timeliness and integrity. When

processing event streams asynchronously, there is no guarantee of timeliness, unless

you explicitly build consumers that wait for a message to arrive before returning. But

integrity is in fact central to streaming systems.

Exactly-once or effectively-once semantics (see “Fault Tolerance” on page 476) is a mechanism for preserving integrity. If an event is lost, or if an event takes effect twice, the integrity of a data system could be violated. Thus, fault-tolerant message

delivery and duplicate suppression (e.g., idempotent operations) are important for

maintaining the integrity of a data system in the face of faults.

As we saw in the last section, reliable stream processing systems can preserve integ‐

rity without requiring distributed transactions and an atomic commit protocol,

which means they can potentially achieve comparable correctness with much better

Aiming for Correctness | 525

performance and operational robustness. We achieved this integrity through a com‐

bination of mechanisms:

• Representing the content of the write operation as a single message, which can

easily be written atomically—an approach that fits very well with event sourcing

(see “Event Sourcing” on page 457)

• Deriving all other state updates from that single message using deterministic der‐

ivation functions, similarly to stored procedures (see “Actual Serial Execution”

on page 252 and “Application code as a derivation function” on page 505)

• Passing a client-generated request ID through all these levels of processing, ena‐

bling end-to-end duplicate suppression and idempotence

• Making messages immutable and allowing derived data to be reprocessed from

time to time, which makes it easier to recover from bugs (see “Advantages of

immutable events” on page 460)

This combination of mechanisms seems to me a very promising direction for build‐

ing fault-tolerant applications in the future.

Loosely interpreted constraints

As discussed previously, enforcing a uniqueness constraint requires consensus, typi‐

cally implemented by funneling all events in a particular partition through a single

node. This limitation is unavoidable if we want the traditional form of uniqueness

constraint, and stream processing cannot avoid it.

However, another thing to realize is that many real applications can actually get away

with much weaker notions of uniqueness:

• If two people concurrently register the same username or book the same seat,

you can send one of them a message to apologize, and ask them to choose a dif‐

ferent one. This kind of change to correct a mistake is called a compensating

transaction [59, 60].

• If customers order more items than you have in your warehouse, you can order

in more stock, apologize to customers for the delay, and offer them a discount.

This is actually the same as what you’d have to do if, say, a forklift truck ran over

some of the items in your warehouse, leaving you with fewer items in stock than

you thought you had [61]. Thus, the apology workflow already needs to be part

of your business processes anyway, and so it might be unnecessary to require a

linearizable constraint on the number of items in stock.

• Similarly, many airlines overbook airplanes in the expectation that some passen‐

gers will miss their flight, and many hotels overbook rooms, expecting that some

guests will cancel. In these cases, the constraint of “one person per seat” is delib‐

526 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

erately violated for business reasons, and compensation processes (refunds,

upgrades, providing a complimentary room at a neighboring hotel) are put in

place to handle situations in which demand exceeds supply. Even if there was no

overbooking, apology and compensation processes would be needed in order to

deal with flights being cancelled due to bad weather or staff on strike—recover‐

ing from such issues is just a normal part of business [3].

• If someone withdraws more money than they have in their account, the bank can

charge them an overdraft fee and ask them to pay back what they owe. By limit‐

ing the total withdrawals per day, the risk to the bank is bounded.

In many business contexts, it is actually acceptable to temporarily violate a constraint

and fix it up later by apologizing. The cost of the apology (in terms of money or repu‐

tation) varies, but it is often quite low: you can’t unsend an email, but you can send a

follow-up email with a correction. If you accidentally charge a credit card twice, you

can refund one of the charges, and the cost to you is just the processing fees and per‐

haps a customer complaint. Once money has been paid out of an ATM, you can’t

directly get it back, although in principle you can send debt collectors to recover the

money if the account was overdrawn and the customer won’t pay it back.

Whether the cost of the apology is acceptable is a business decision. If it is acceptable,

the traditional model of checking all constraints before even writing the data is

unnecessarily restrictive, and a linearizable constraint is not needed. It may well be a

reasonable choice to go ahead with a write optimistically, and to check the constraint

after the fact. You can still ensure that the validation occurs before doing things that

would be expensive to recover from, but that doesn’t imply you must do the valida‐

tion before you even write the data.

These applications do require integrity: you would not want to lose a reservation, or

have money disappear due to mismatched credits and debits. But they don’t require

timeliness on the enforcement of the constraint: if you have sold more items than you

have in the warehouse, you can patch up the problem after the fact by apologizing.

Doing so is similar to the conflict resolution approaches we discussed in “Handling

Write Conflicts” on page 171.

Coordination-avoiding data systems

We have now made two interesting observations:

1. Dataflow systems can maintain integrity guarantees on derived data without

atomic commit, linearizability, or synchronous cross-partition coordination.

2. Although strict uniqueness constraints require timeliness and coordination,

many applications are actually fine with loose constraints that may be temporar‐

ily violated and fixed up later, as long as integrity is preserved throughout.

Aiming for Correctness | 527

Taken together, these observations mean that dataflow systems can provide the data

management services for many applications without requiring coordination, while

still giving strong integrity guarantees. Such coordination-avoiding data systems have

a lot of appeal: they can achieve better performance and fault tolerance than systems

that need to perform synchronous coordination [56].

For example, such a system could operate distributed across multiple datacenters in a

multi-leader configuration, asynchronously replicating between regions. Any one

datacenter can continue operating independently from the others, because no syn‐

chronous cross-region coordination is required. Such a system would have weak

timeliness guarantees—it could not be linearizable without introducing coordination

—but it can still have strong integrity guarantees.

In this context, serializable transactions are still useful as part of maintaining derived

state, but they can be run at a small scope where they work well [8]. Heterogeneous

distributed transactions such as XA transactions (see “Distributed Transactions in

Practice” on page 360) are not required. Synchronous coordination can still be intro‐

duced in places where it is needed (for example, to enforce strict constraints before

an operation from which recovery is not possible), but there is no need for everything

to pay the cost of coordination if only a small part of an application needs it [43].

Another way of looking at coordination and constraints: they reduce the number of

apologies you have to make due to inconsistencies, but potentially also reduce the

performance and availability of your system, and thus potentially increase the num‐

ber of apologies you have to make due to outages. You cannot reduce the number of

apologies to zero, but you can aim to find the best trade-off for your needs—the

sweet spot where there are neither too many inconsistencies nor too many availability

problems.

Trust, but Verify

All of our discussion of correctness, integrity, and fault-tolerance has been under the

assumption that certain things might go wrong, but other things won’t. We call these

assumptions our system model (see “Mapping system models to the real world” on

page 309): for example, we should assume that processes can crash, machines can

suddenly lose power, and the network can arbitrarily delay or drop messages. But we

might also assume that data written to disk is not lost after fsync, that data in mem‐

ory is not corrupted, and that the multiplication instruction of our CPU always

returns the correct result.

These assumptions are quite reasonable, as they are true most of the time, and it

would be difficult to get anything done if we had to constantly worry about our com‐

puters making mistakes. Traditionally, system models take a binary approach toward

faults: we assume that some things can happen, and other things can never happen.

In reality, it is more a question of probabilities: some things are more likely, other

528 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

things less likely. The question is whether violations of our assumptions happen often

enough that we may encounter them in practice.

We have seen that data can become corrupted while it is sitting untouched on disks

(see “Replication and Durability” on page 227), and data corruption on the network

can sometimes evade the TCP checksums (see “Weak forms of lying” on page 306).

Maybe this is something we should be paying more attention to?

One application that I worked on in the past collected crash reports from clients, and

some of the reports we received could only be explained by random bit-flips in the

memory of those devices. It seems unlikely, but if you have enough devices running

your software, even very unlikely things do happen. Besides random memory corrup‐

tion due to hardware faults or radiation, certain pathological memory access patterns

can flip bits even in memory that has no faults [62]—an effect that can be used to

break security mechanisms in operating systems [63] (this technique is known as

rowhammer). Once you look closely, hardware isn’t quite the perfect abstraction that

it may seem.

To be clear, random bit-flips are still very rare on modern hardware [64]. I just want

to point out that they are not beyond the realm of possibility, and so they deserve

some attention.

Maintaining integrity in the face of software bugs

Besides such hardware issues, there is always the risk of software bugs, which would

not be caught by lower-level network, memory, or filesystem checksums. Even widely

used database software has bugs: I have personally seen cases of MySQL failing to

correctly maintain a uniqueness constraint [65] and PostgreSQL’s serializable isola‐

tion level exhibiting write skew anomalies [66], even though MySQL and PostgreSQL

are robust and well-regarded databases that have been battle-tested by many people

for many years. In less mature software, the situation is likely to be much worse.

Despite considerable efforts in careful design, testing, and review, bugs still creep in.

Although they are rare, and they eventually get found and fixed, there is still a period

during which such bugs can corrupt data.

When it comes to application code, we have to assume many more bugs, since most

applications don’t receive anywhere near the amount of review and testing that data‐

base code does. Many applications don’t even correctly use the features that databases

offer for preserving integrity, such as foreign key or uniqueness constraints [36].

Consistency in the sense of ACID (see “Consistency” on page 224) is based on the

idea that the database starts off in a consistent state, and a transaction transforms it

from one consistent state to another consistent state. Thus, we expect the database to

always be in a consistent state. However, this notion only makes sense if you assume

that the transaction is free from bugs. If the application uses the database incorrectly

Aiming for Correctness | 529

in some way, for example using a weak isolation level unsafely, the integrity of the

database cannot be guaranteed.

Don’t just blindly trust what they promise

With both hardware and software not always living up to the ideal that we would like

them to be, it seems that data corruption is inevitable sooner or later. Thus, we

should at least have a way of finding out if data has been corrupted so that we can fix

it and try to track down the source of the error. Checking the integrity of data is

known as auditing.

As discussed in “Advantages of immutable events” on page 460, auditing is not just

for financial applications. However, auditability is highly important in finance pre‐

cisely because everyone knows that mistakes happen, and we all recognize the need to

be able to detect and fix problems.

Mature systems similarly tend to consider the possibility of unlikely things going

wrong, and manage that risk. For example, large-scale storage systems such as HDFS

and Amazon S3 do not fully trust disks: they run background processes that continu‐

ally read back files, compare them to other replicas, and move files from one disk to

another, in order to mitigate the risk of silent corruption [67].

If you want to be sure that your data is still there, you have to actually read it and

check. Most of the time it will still be there, but if it isn’t, you really want to find out

sooner rather than later. By the same argument, it is important to try restoring from

your backups from time to time—otherwise you may only find out that your backup

is broken when it is too late and you have already lost data. Don’t just blindly trust

that it is all working.

A culture of verification

Systems like HDFS and S3 still have to assume that disks work correctly most of the

time—which is a reasonable assumption, but not the same as assuming that they

always work correctly. However, not many systems currently have this kind of “trust,

but verify” approach of continually auditing themselves. Many assume that correct‐

ness guarantees are absolute and make no provision for the possibility of rare data

corruption. I hope that in the future we will see more self-validating or self-auditing

systems that continually check their own integrity, rather than relying on blind trust

[68].

I fear that the culture of ACID databases has led us toward developing applications

on the basis of blindly trusting technology (such as a transaction mechanism), and

neglecting any sort of auditability in the process. Since the technology we trusted

worked well enough most of the time, auditing mechanisms were not deemed worth

the investment.

530 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

But then the database landscape changed: weaker consistency guarantees became the

norm under the banner of NoSQL, and less mature storage technologies became

widely used. Yet, because the audit mechanisms had not been developed, we contin‐

ued building applications on the basis of blind trust, even though this approach had

now become more dangerous. Let’s think for a moment about designing for audita‐

bility.

Designing for auditability

If a transaction mutates several objects in a database, it is difficult to tell after the fact

what that transaction means. Even if you capture the transaction logs (see “Change

Data Capture” on page 454), the insertions, updates, and deletions in various tables

do not necessarily give a clear picture of why those mutations were performed. The

invocation of the application logic that decided on those mutations is transient and

cannot be reproduced.

By contrast, event-based systems can provide better auditability. In the event sourc‐

ing approach, user input to the system is represented as a single immutable event,

and any resulting state updates are derived from that event. The derivation can be

made deterministic and repeatable, so that running the same log of events through

the same version of the derivation code will result in the same state updates.

Being explicit about dataflow (see “Philosophy of batch process outputs” on page

413) makes the provenance of data much clearer, which makes integrity checking

much more feasible. For the event log, we can use hashes to check that the event stor‐

age has not been corrupted. For any derived state, we can rerun the batch and stream

processors that derived it from the event log in order to check whether we get the

same result, or even run a redundant derivation in parallel.

A deterministic and well-defined dataflow also makes it easier to debug and trace the

execution of a system in order to determine why it did something [4, 69]. If some‐

thing unexpected occurred, it is valuable to have the diagnostic capability to repro‐

duce the exact circumstances that led to the unexpected event—a kind of time-travel

debugging capability.

The end-to-end argument again

If we cannot fully trust that every individual component of the system will be free

from corruption—that every piece of hardware is fault-free and that every piece of

software is bug-free—then we must at least periodically check the integrity of our

data. If we don’t check, we won’t find out about corruption until it is too late and it

has caused some downstream damage, at which point it will be much harder and

more expensive to track down the problem.

Checking the integrity of data systems is best done in an end-to-end fashion (see

“The End-to-End Argument for Databases” on page 516): the more systems we can

Aiming for Correctness | 531

include in an integrity check, the fewer opportunities there are for corruption to go

unnoticed at some stage of the process. If we can check that an entire derived data

pipeline is correct end to end, then any disks, networks, services, and algorithms

along the path are implicitly included in the check.

Having continuous end-to-end integrity checks gives you increased confidence about

the correctness of your systems, which in turn allows you to move faster [70]. Like

automated testing, auditing increases the chances that bugs will be found quickly,

and thus reduces the risk that a change to the system or a new storage technology will

cause damage. If you are not afraid of making changes, you can much better evolve

an application to meet changing requirements.

Tools for auditable data systems

At present, not many data systems make auditability a top-level concern. Some appli‐

cations implement their own audit mechanisms, for example by logging all changes

to a separate audit table, but guaranteeing the integrity of the audit log and the data‐

base state is still difficult. A transaction log can be made tamper-proof by periodically

signing it with a hardware security module, but that does not guarantee that the right

transactions went into the log in the first place.

It would be interesting to use cryptographic tools to prove the integrity of a system in

a way that is robust to a wide range of hardware and software issues, and even poten‐

tially malicious actions. Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and distributed ledger tech‐

nologies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar, and various others [71, 72, 73]

have sprung up to explore this area.

I am not qualified to comment on the merits of these technologies as currencies or

mechanisms for agreeing contracts. However, from a data systems point of view they

contain some interesting ideas. Essentially, they are distributed databases, with a data

model and transaction mechanism, in which different replicas can be hosted by

mutually untrusting organizations. The replicas continually check each other’s integ‐

rity and use a consensus protocol to agree on the transactions that should be exe‐

cuted.

I am somewhat skeptical about the Byzantine fault tolerance aspects of these technol‐

ogies (see “Byzantine Faults” on page 304), and I find the technique of proof of work (e.g., Bitcoin mining) extraordinarily wasteful. The transaction throughput of Bitcoin is rather low, albeit for political and economic reasons more than for technical ones.

However, the integrity checking aspects are interesting.

Cryptographic auditing and integrity checking often relies on Merkle trees [74],

which are trees of hashes that can be used to efficiently prove that a record appears in

some dataset (and a few other things). Outside of the hype of cryptocurrencies, certif‐

icate transparency is a security technology that relies on Merkle trees to check the val‐

idity of TLS/SSL certificates [75, 76].

532 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

I could imagine integrity-checking and auditing algorithms, like those of certificate

transparency and distributed ledgers, becoming more widely used in data systems in

general. Some work will be needed to make them equally scalable as systems without

cryptographic auditing, and to keep the performance penalty as low as possible. But I

think this is an interesting area to watch in the future.

Doing the Right Thing

In the final section of this book, I would like to take a step back. Throughout this

book we have examined a wide range of different architectures for data systems, eval‐

uated their pros and cons, and explored techniques for building reliable, scalable, and

maintainable applications. However, we have left out an important and fundamental

part of the discussion, which I would now like to fill in.

Every system is built for a purpose; every action we take has both intended and unin‐

tended consequences. The purpose may be as simple as making money, but the con‐

sequences for the world may reach far beyond that original purpose. We, the

engineers building these systems, have a responsibility to carefully consider those

consequences and to consciously decide what kind of world we want to live in.

We talk about data as an abstract thing, but remember that many datasets are about

people: their behavior, their interests, their identity. We must treat such data with

humanity and respect. Users are humans too, and human dignity is paramount.

Software development increasingly involves making important ethical choices. There

are guidelines to help software engineers navigate these issues, such as the ACM’s

Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice [77], but they are

rarely discussed, applied, and enforced in practice. As a result, engineers and product

managers sometimes take a very cavalier attitude to privacy and potential negative

consequences of their products [78, 79, 80].

A technology is not good or bad in itself—what matters is how it is used and how it

affects people. This is true for a software system like a search engine in much the

same way as it is for a weapon like a gun. I think it is not sufficient for software engi‐

neers to focus exclusively on the technology and ignore its consequences: the ethical

responsibility is ours to bear also. Reasoning about ethics is difficult, but it is too

important to ignore.

Predictive Analytics

For example, predictive analytics is a major part of the “Big Data” hype. Using data

analysis to predict the weather, or the spread of diseases, is one thing [81]; it is

another matter to predict whether a convict is likely to reoffend, whether an applicant

for a loan is likely to default, or whether an insurance customer is likely to make

expensive claims. The latter have a direct effect on individual people’s lives.

Doing the Right Thing | 533

Naturally, payment networks want to prevent fraudulent transactions, banks want to

avoid bad loans, airlines want to avoid hijackings, and companies want to avoid hir‐

ing ineffective or untrustworthy people. From their point of view, the cost of a missed

business opportunity is low, but the cost of a bad loan or a problematic employee is

much higher, so it is natural for organizations to want to be cautious. If in doubt,

they are better off saying no.

However, as algorithmic decision-making becomes more widespread, someone who

has (accurately or falsely) been labeled as risky by some algorithm may suffer a large

number of those “no” decisions. Systematically being excluded from jobs, air travel,

insurance coverage, property rental, financial services, and other key aspects of soci‐

ety is such a large constraint of the individual’s freedom that it has been called “algo‐

rithmic prison” [82]. In countries that respect human rights, the criminal justice

system presumes innocence until proven guilty; on the other hand, automated sys‐

tems can systematically and arbitrarily exclude a person from participating in society

without any proof of guilt, and with little chance of appeal.

Bias and discrimination

Decisions made by an algorithm are not necessarily any better or any worse than

those made by a human. Every person is likely to have biases, even if they actively try

to counteract them, and discriminatory practices can become culturally institutional‐

ized. There is hope that basing decisions on data, rather than subjective and instinc‐

tive assessments by people, could be more fair and give a better chance to people who

are often overlooked in the traditional system [83].

When we develop predictive analytics systems, we are not merely automating a

human’s decision by using software to specify the rules for when to say yes or no; we

are even leaving the rules themselves to be inferred from data. However, the patterns

learned by these systems are opaque: even if there is some correlation in the data, we

may not know why. If there is a systematic bias in the input to an algorithm, the sys‐

tem will most likely learn and amplify that bias in its output [84].

In many countries, anti-discrimination laws prohibit treating people differently

depending on protected traits such as ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, disability, or

beliefs. Other features of a person’s data may be analyzed, but what happens if they

are correlated with protected traits? For example, in racially segregated neighbor‐

hoods, a person’s postal code or even their IP address is a strong predictor of race.

Put like this, it seems ridiculous to believe that an algorithm could somehow take

biased data as input and produce fair and impartial output from it [85]. Yet this belief often seems to be implied by proponents of data-driven decision making, an attitude that has been satirized as “machine learning is like money laundering for bias” [86].

Predictive analytics systems merely extrapolate from the past; if the past is discrimi‐

natory, they codify that discrimination. If we want the future to be better than the

534 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

past, moral imagination is required, and that’s something only humans can provide

[87]. Data and models should be our tools, not our masters.

Responsibility and accountability

Automated decision making opens the question of responsibility and accountability

[87]. If a human makes a mistake, they can be held accountable, and the person affec‐

ted by the decision can appeal. Algorithms make mistakes too, but who is accounta‐

ble if they go wrong [88]? When a self-driving car causes an accident, who is

responsible? If an automated credit scoring algorithm systematically discriminates

against people of a particular race or religion, is there any recourse? If a decision by

your machine learning system comes under judicial review, can you explain to the

judge how the algorithm made its decision?

Credit rating agencies are an old example of collecting data to make decisions about

people. A bad credit score makes life difficult, but at least a credit score is normally

based on relevant facts about a person’s actual borrowing history, and any errors in

the record can be corrected (although the agencies normally do not make this easy).

However, scoring algorithms based on machine learning typically use a much wider

range of inputs and are much more opaque, making it harder to understand how a

particular decision has come about and whether someone is being treated in an

unfair or discriminatory way [89].

A credit score summarizes “How did you behave in the past?” whereas predictive

analytics usually work on the basis of “Who is similar to you, and how did people like

you behave in the past?” Drawing parallels to others’ behavior implies stereotyping

people, for example based on where they live (a close proxy for race and socioeco‐

nomic class). What about people who get put in the wrong bucket? Furthermore, if a

decision is incorrect due to erroneous data, recourse is almost impossible [87].

Much data is statistical in nature, which means that even if the probability distribu‐

tion on the whole is correct, individual cases may well be wrong. For example, if the

average life expectancy in your country is 80 years, that doesn’t mean you’re expected

to drop dead on your 80th birthday. From the average and the probability distribu‐

tion, you can’t say much about the age to which one particular person will live. Simi‐

larly, the output of a prediction system is probabilistic and may well be wrong in

individual cases.

A blind belief in the supremacy of data for making decisions is not only delusional, it

is positively dangerous. As data-driven decision making becomes more widespread,

we will need to figure out how to make algorithms accountable and transparent, how

to avoid reinforcing existing biases, and how to fix them when they inevitably make

mistakes.

We will also need to figure out how to prevent data being used to harm people, and

realize its positive potential instead. For example, analytics can reveal financial and

Doing the Right Thing | 535

social characteristics of people’s lives. On the one hand, this power could be used to

focus aid and support to help those people who most need it. On the other hand, it is

sometimes used by predatory business seeking to identify vulnerable people and sell

them risky products such as high-cost loans and worthless college degrees [87, 90].

Feedback loops

Even with predictive applications that have less immediately far-reaching effects on

people, such as recommendation systems, there are difficult issues that we must con‐

front. When services become good at predicting what content users want to see, they

may end up showing people only opinions they already agree with, leading to echo

chambers in which stereotypes, misinformation, and polarization can breed. We are

already seeing the impact of social media echo chambers on election campaigns [91].

When predictive analytics affect people’s lives, particularly pernicious problems arise

due to self-reinforcing feedback loops. For example, consider the case of employers

using credit scores to evaluate potential hires. You may be a good worker with a good

credit score, but suddenly find yourself in financial difficulties due to a misfortune

outside of your control. As you miss payments on your bills, your credit score suffers,

and you will be less likely to find work. Joblessness pushes you toward poverty, which

further worsens your scores, making it even harder to find employment [87]. It’s a

downward spiral due to poisonous assumptions, hidden behind a camouflage of

mathematical rigor and data.

We can’t always predict when such feedback loops happen. However, many conse‐

quences can be predicted by thinking about the entire system (not just the computer‐

ized parts, but also the people interacting with it)—an approach known as systems

thinking [92]. We can try to understand how a data analysis system responds to different behaviors, structures, or characteristics. Does the system reinforce and amplify existing differences between people (e.g., making the rich richer or the poor poorer),

or does it try to combat injustice? And even with the best intentions, we must beware

of unintended consequences.

Privacy and Tracking

Besides the problems of predictive analytics—i.e., using data to make automated

decisions about people—there are ethical problems with data collection itself. What is

the relationship between the organizations collecting data and the people whose data

is being collected?

When a system only stores data that a user has explicitly entered, because they want

the system to store and process it in a certain way, the system is performing a service

for the user: the user is the customer. But when a user’s activity is tracked and logged

as a side effect of other things they are doing, the relationship is less clear. The service

536 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

no longer just does what the user tells it to do, but it takes on interests of its own,

which may conflict with the user’s interests.

Tracking behavioral data has become increasingly important for user-facing features

of many online services: tracking which search results are clicked helps improve the

ranking of search results; recommending “people who liked X also liked Y” helps

users discover interesting and useful things; A/B tests and user flow analysis can help

indicate how a user interface might be improved. Those features require some

amount of tracking of user behavior, and users benefit from them.

However, depending on a company’s business model, tracking often doesn’t stop

there. If the service is funded through advertising, the advertisers are the actual cus‐

tomers, and the users’ interests take second place. Tracking data becomes more

detailed, analyses become further-reaching, and data is retained for a long time in

order to build up detailed profiles of each person for marketing purposes.

Now the relationship between the company and the user whose data is being collec‐

ted starts looking quite different. The user is given a free service and is coaxed into

engaging with it as much as possible. The tracking of the user serves not primarily

that individual, but rather the needs of the advertisers who are funding the service. I

think this relationship can be appropriately described with a word that has more sin‐

ister connotations: surveillance.

Surveillance

As a thought experiment, try replacing the word data with surveillance, and observe if

common phrases still sound so good [93]. How about this: “In our surveillance-

driven organization we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our

surveillance warehouse. Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and sur‐

veillance processing in order to derive new insights.”

This thought experiment is unusually polemic for this book, Designing Surveillance-

Intensive Applications, but I think that strong words are needed to emphasize this

point. In our attempts to make software “eat the world” [94], we have built the great‐

est mass surveillance infrastructure the world has ever seen. Rushing toward an Inter‐

net of Things, we are rapidly approaching a world in which every inhabited space

contains at least one internet-connected microphone, in the form of smartphones,

smart TVs, voice-controlled assistant devices, baby monitors, and even children’s

toys that use cloud-based speech recognition. Many of these devices have a terrible

security record [95].

Even the most totalitarian and repressive regimes could only dream of putting a

microphone in every room and forcing every person to constantly carry a device

capable of tracking their location and movements. Yet we apparently voluntarily,

even enthusiastically, throw ourselves into this world of total surveillance. The differ‐

Doing the Right Thing | 537

ence is just that the data is being collected by corporations rather than government

agencies [96].

Not all data collection necessarily qualifies as surveillance, but examining it as such

can help us understand our relationship with the data collector. Why are we seem‐

ingly happy to accept surveillance by corporations? Perhaps you feel you have noth‐

ing to hide—in other words, you are totally in line with existing power structures,

you are not a marginalized minority, and you needn’t fear persecution [97]. Not

everyone is so fortunate. Or perhaps it’s because the purpose seems benign—it’s not

overt coercion and conformance, but merely better recommendations and more per‐

sonalized marketing. However, combined with the discussion of predictive analytics

from the last section, that distinction seems less clear.

We are already seeing car insurance premiums linked to tracking devices in cars, and

health insurance coverage that depends on people wearing a fitness tracking device.

When surveillance is used to determine things that hold sway over important aspects

of life, such as insurance coverage or employment, it starts to appear less benign.

Moreover, data analysis can reveal surprisingly intrusive things: for example, the

movement sensor in a smartwatch or fitness tracker can be used to work out what

you are typing (for example, passwords) with fairly good accuracy [98]. And algo‐

rithms for analysis are only going to get better.

Consent and freedom of choice

We might assert that users voluntarily choose to use a service that tracks their activ‐

ity, and they have agreed to the terms of service and privacy policy, so they consent to

data collection. We might even claim that users are receiving a valuable service in

return for the data they provide, and that the tracking is necessary in order to provide

the service. Undoubtedly, social networks, search engines, and various other free

online services are valuable to users—but there are problems with this argument.

Users have little knowledge of what data they are feeding into our databases, or how

it is retained and processed—and most privacy policies do more to obscure than to

illuminate. Without understanding what happens to their data, users cannot give any

meaningful consent. Often, data from one user also says things about other people

who are not users of the service and who have not agreed to any terms. The derived

datasets that we discussed in this part of the book—in which data from the entire

user base may have been combined with behavioral tracking and external data sour‐

ces—are precisely the kinds of data of which users cannot have any meaningful

understanding.

Moreover, data is extracted from users through a one-way process, not a relationship

with true reciprocity, and not a fair value exchange. There is no dialog, no option for

users to negotiate how much data they provide and what service they receive in

538 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

return: the relationship between the service and the user is very asymmetric and one-

sided. The terms are set by the service, not by the user [99].

For a user who does not consent to surveillance, the only real alternative is simply not

to use a service. But this choice is not free either: if a service is so popular that it is

“regarded by most people as essential for basic social participation” [99], then it is not

reasonable to expect people to opt out of this service—using it is de facto mandatory.

For example, in most Western social communities, it has become the norm to carry a

smartphone, to use Facebook for socializing, and to use Google for finding informa‐

tion. Especially when a service has network effects, there is a social cost to people

choosing not to use it.

Declining to use a service due to its tracking of users is only an option for the small

number of people who are privileged enough to have the time and knowledge to

understand its privacy policy, and who can afford to potentially miss out on social

participation or professional opportunities that may have arisen if they had participa‐

ted in the service. For people in a less privileged position, there is no meaningful free‐

dom of choice: surveillance becomes inescapable.

Privacy and use of data

Sometimes people claim that “privacy is dead” on the grounds that some users are

willing to post all sorts of things about their lives to social media, sometimes mun‐

dane and sometimes deeply personal. However, this claim is false and rests on a mis‐

understanding of the word privacy.

Having privacy does not mean keeping everything secret; it means having the free‐

dom to choose which things to reveal to whom, what to make public, and what to

keep secret. The right to privacy is a decision right: it enables each person to decide

where they want to be on the spectrum between secrecy and transparency in each sit‐

uation [99]. It is an important aspect of a person’s freedom and autonomy.

When data is extracted from people through surveillance infrastructure, privacy

rights are not necessarily eroded, but rather transferred to the data collector. Compa‐

nies that acquire data essentially say “trust us to do the right thing with your data,”

which means that the right to decide what to reveal and what to keep secret is trans‐

ferred from the individual to the company.

The companies in turn choose to keep much of the outcome of this surveillance

secret, because to reveal it would be perceived as creepy, and would harm their busi‐

ness model (which relies on knowing more about people than other companies do).

Intimate information about users is only revealed indirectly, for example in the form

of tools for targeting advertisements to specific groups of people (such as those suf‐

fering from a particular illness).

Doing the Right Thing | 539

Even if particular users cannot be personally reidentified from the bucket of people

targeted by a particular ad, they have lost their agency about the disclosure of some

intimate information, such as whether they suffer from some illness. It is not the user

who decides what is revealed to whom on the basis of their personal preferences—it

is the company that exercises the privacy right with the goal of maximizing its profit.

Many companies have a goal of not being perceived as creepy—avoiding the question

of how intrusive their data collection actually is, and instead focusing on managing

user perceptions. And even these perceptions are often managed poorly: for example,

something may be factually correct, but if it triggers painful memories, the user may

not want to be reminded about it [100]. With any kind of data we should expect the

possibility that it is wrong, undesirable, or inappropriate in some way, and we need to

build mechanisms for handling those failures. Whether something is “undesirable” or

“inappropriate” is of course down to human judgment; algorithms are oblivious to

such notions unless we explicitly program them to respect human needs. As engi‐

neers of these systems we must be humble, accepting and planning for such failings.

Privacy settings that allow a user of an online service to control which aspects of their

data other users can see are a starting point for handing back some control to users.

However, regardless of the setting, the service itself still has unfettered access to the

data, and is free to use it in any way permitted by the privacy policy. Even if the ser‐

vice promises not to sell the data to third parties, it usually grants itself unrestricted

rights to process and analyze the data internally, often going much further than what

is overtly visible to users.

This kind of large-scale transfer of privacy rights from individuals to corporations is

historically unprecedented [99]. Surveillance has always existed, but it used to be

expensive and manual, not scalable and automated. Trust relationships have always

existed, for example between a patient and their doctor, or between a defendant and

their attorney—but in these cases the use of data has been strictly governed by ethical,

legal, and regulatory constraints. Internet services have made it much easier to amass

huge amounts of sensitive information without meaningful consent, and to use it at

massive scale without users understanding what is happening to their private data.

Data as assets and power

Since behavioral data is a byproduct of users interacting with a service, it is some‐

times called “data exhaust”—suggesting that the data is worthless waste material.

Viewed this way, behavioral and predictive analytics can be seen as a form of recy‐

cling that extracts value from data that would have otherwise been thrown away.

More correct would be to view it the other way round: from an economic point of

view, if targeted advertising is what pays for a service, then behavioral data about

people is the service’s core asset. In this case, the application with which the user

interacts is merely a means to lure users into feeding more and more personal infor‐

540 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

mation into the surveillance infrastructure [99]. The delightful human creativity and

social relationships that often find expression in online services are cynically exploi‐

ted by the data extraction machine.

The assertion that personal data is a valuable asset is supported by the existence of

data brokers, a shady industry operating in secrecy, purchasing, aggregating, analyz‐

ing, inferring, and reselling intrusive personal data about people, mostly for market‐

ing purposes [90]. Startups are valued by their user numbers, by “eyeballs”—i.e., by

their surveillance capabilities.

Because the data is valuable, many people want it. Of course companies want it—

that’s why they collect it in the first place. But governments want to obtain it too: by

means of secret deals, coercion, legal compulsion, or simply stealing it [101]. When a

company goes bankrupt, the personal data it has collected is one of the assets that get

sold. Moreover, the data is difficult to secure, so breaches happen disconcertingly

often [102].

These observations have led critics to saying that data is not just an asset, but a “toxic

asset” [101], or at least “hazardous material” [103]. Even if we think that we are capable of preventing abuse of data, whenever we collect data, we need to balance the benefits with the risk of it falling into the wrong hands: computer systems may be compromised by criminals or hostile foreign intelligence services, data may be leaked

by insiders, the company may fall into the hands of unscrupulous management that

does not share our values, or the country may be taken over by a regime that has no

qualms about compelling us to hand over the data.

When collecting data, we need to consider not just today’s political environment, but

all possible future governments. There is no guarantee that every government elected

in future will respect human rights and civil liberties, so “it is poor civic hygiene to

install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state” [104].

“Knowledge is power,” as the old adage goes. And furthermore, “to scrutinize others

while avoiding scrutiny oneself is one of the most important forms of power” [105].

This is why totalitarian governments want surveillance: it gives them the power to

control the population. Although today’s technology companies are not overtly seek‐

ing political power, the data and knowledge they have accumulated nevertheless gives

them a lot of power over our lives, much of which is surreptitious, outside of public

oversight [106].

Remembering the Industrial Revolution

Data is the defining feature of the information age. The internet, data storage, pro‐

cessing, and software-driven automation are having a major impact on the global

economy and human society. As our daily lives and social organization have changed

in the past decade, and will probably continue to radically change in the coming dec‐

ades, comparisons to the Industrial Revolution come to mind [87, 96].

Doing the Right Thing | 541

The Industrial Revolution came about through major technological and agricultural

advances, and it brought sustained economic growth and significantly improved liv‐

ing standards in the long run. Yet it also came with major problems: pollution of the

air (due to smoke and chemical processes) and the water (from industrial and human

waste) was dreadful. Factory owners lived in splendor, while urban workers often

lived in very poor housing and worked long hours in harsh conditions. Child labor

was common, including dangerous and poorly paid work in mines.

It took a long time before safeguards were established, such as environmental protec‐

tion regulations, safety protocols for workplaces, outlawing child labor, and health

inspections for food. Undoubtedly the cost of doing business increased when facto‐

ries could no longer dump their waste into rivers, sell tainted foods, or exploit work‐

ers. But society as a whole benefited hugely, and few of us would want to return to a

time before those regulations [87].

Just as the Industrial Revolution had a dark side that needed to be managed, our tran‐

sition to the information age has major problems that we need to confront and solve.

I believe that the collection and use of data is one of those problems. In the words of

Bruce Schneier [96]:

Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the

environmental challenge. Almost all computers produce information. It stays around,

festering. How we deal with it—how we contain it and how we dispose of it—is central

to the health of our information economy. Just as we look back today at the early deca‐

des of the industrial age and wonder how our ancestors could have ignored pollution

in their rush to build an industrial world, our grandchildren will look back at us during

these early decades of the information age and judge us on how we addressed the chal‐

lenge of data collection and misuse.

We should try to make them proud.

Legislation and self-regulation

Data protection laws might be able to help preserve individuals’ rights. For example,

the 1995 European Data Protection Directive states that personal data must be “col‐

lected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a

way incompatible with those purposes,” and furthermore that data must be “ade‐

quate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collec‐

ted” [107].

However, it is doubtful whether this legislation is effective in today’s internet context

[108]. These rules run directly counter to the philosophy of Big Data, which is to

maximize data collection, to combine it with other datasets, to experiment and to

explore in order to generate new insights. Exploration means using data for unfore‐

seen purposes, which is the opposite of the “specified and explicit” purposes for

which the user gave their consent (if we can meaningfully speak of consent at all

[109]). Updated regulations are now being developed [89].

542 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Companies that collect lots of data about people oppose regulation as being a burden

and a hindrance to innovation. To some extent that opposition is justified. For exam‐

ple, when sharing medical data, there are clear risks to privacy, but there are also

potential opportunities: how many deaths could be prevented if data analysis was

able to help us achieve better diagnostics or find better treatments [110]? Over-

regulation may prevent such breakthroughs. It is difficult to balance such potential

opportunities with the risks [105].

Fundamentally, I think we need a culture shift in the tech industry with regard to

personal data. We should stop regarding users as metrics to be optimized, and

remember that they are humans who deserve respect, dignity, and agency. We should

self-regulate our data collection and processing practices in order to establish and

maintain the trust of the people who depend on our software [111]. And we should

take it upon ourselves to educate end users about how their data is used, rather than

keeping them in the dark.

We should allow each individual to maintain their privacy—i.e., their control over

own data—and not steal that control from them through surveillance. Our individual

right to control our data is like the natural environment of a national park: if we

don’t explicitly protect and care for it, it will be destroyed. It will be the tragedy of the

commons, and we will all be worse off for it. Ubiquitous surveillance is not inevitable

—we are still able to stop it.

How exactly we might achieve this is an open question. To begin with, we should not

retain data forever, but purge it as soon as it is no longer needed [111, 112]. Purging data runs counter to the idea of immutability (see “Limitations of immutability” on

page 463), but that issue can be solved. A promising approach I see is to enforce

access control through cryptographic protocols, rather than merely by policy [113,

114]. Overall, culture and attitude changes will be necessary.

Summary

In this chapter we discussed new approaches to designing data systems, and I

included my personal opinions and speculations about the future. We started with

the observation that there is no one single tool that can efficiently serve all possible

use cases, and so applications necessarily need to compose several different pieces of

software to accomplish their goals. We discussed how to solve this data integration

problem by using batch processing and event streams to let data changes flow

between different systems.

In this approach, certain systems are designated as systems of record, and other data

is derived from them through transformations. In this way we can maintain indexes,

materialized views, machine learning models, statistical summaries, and more. By

making these derivations and transformations asynchronous and loosely coupled, a

Summary | 543

problem in one area is prevented from spreading to unrelated parts of the system,

increasing the robustness and fault-tolerance of the system as a whole.

Expressing dataflows as transformations from one dataset to another also helps

evolve applications: if you want to change one of the processing steps, for example to

change the structure of an index or cache, you can just rerun the new transformation

code on the whole input dataset in order to rederive the output. Similarly, if some‐

thing goes wrong, you can fix the code and reprocess the data in order to recover.

These processes are quite similar to what databases already do internally, so we recast

the idea of dataflow applications as unbundling the components of a database, and

building an application by composing these loosely coupled components.

Derived state can be updated by observing changes in the underlying data. Moreover,

the derived state itself can further be observed by downstream consumers. We can

even take this dataflow all the way through to the end-user device that is displaying

the data, and thus build user interfaces that dynamically update to reflect data

changes and continue to work offline.

Next, we discussed how to ensure that all of this processing remains correct in the

presence of faults. We saw that strong integrity guarantees can be implemented scala‐

bly with asynchronous event processing, by using end-to-end operation identifiers to

make operations idempotent and by checking constraints asynchronously. Clients

can either wait until the check has passed, or go ahead without waiting but risk hav‐

ing to apologize about a constraint violation. This approach is much more scalable

and robust than the traditional approach of using distributed transactions, and fits

with how many business processes work in practice.

By structuring applications around dataflow and checking constraints asynchro‐

nously, we can avoid most coordination and create systems that maintain integrity

but still perform well, even in geographically distributed scenarios and in the pres‐

ence of faults. We then talked a little about using audits to verify the integrity of data

and detect corruption.

Finally, we took a step back and examined some ethical aspects of building data-

intensive applications. We saw that although data can be used to do good, it can also

do significant harm: making justifying decisions that seriously affect people’s lives

and are difficult to appeal against, leading to discrimination and exploitation, nor‐

malizing surveillance, and exposing intimate information. We also run the risk of

data breaches, and we may find that a well-intentioned use of data has unintended

consequences.

As software and data are having such a large impact on the world, we engineers must

remember that we carry a responsibility to work toward the kind of world that we

want to live in: a world that treats people with humanity and respect. I hope that we

can work together toward that goal.

544 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

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552 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems

Glossary

Please note that the definitions in this glossary are short and sim‐

ple, intended to convey the core idea but not the full subtleties of a

term. For more detail, please follow the references into the main

text.

asynchronous

up with it. Also known as flow control. See

Not waiting for something to complete

“Messaging Systems” on page 441.

(e.g., sending data over the network to

another node), and not making any

batch process

assumptions about how long it is going to

A computation that takes some fixed (and

take. See “Synchronous Versus Asynchro‐

usually large) set of data as input and pro‐

nous Replication” on page 153, “Synchro‐

duces some other data as output, without

nous Versus Asynchronous Networks” on

modifying the input. See Chapter 10.

page 284, and “System Model and Reality”

bounded

on page 306.

Having some known upper limit or size.

atomic

Used for example in the context of net‐

1. In the context of concurrent operations:

work delay (see “Timeouts and Unboun‐

describing an operation that appears to

ded Delays” on page 281) and datasets

take effect at a single point in time, so

(see the introduction to Chapter 11).

another concurrent process can never

Byzantine fault

encounter the operation in a “half-

A node that behaves incorrectly in some

finished” state. See also isolation.

arbitrary way, for example by sending

2. In the context of transactions: grouping

contradictory or malicious messages to

together a set of writes that must either all

other nodes. See “Byzantine Faults” on

be committed or all be rolled back, even if

page 304.

faults occur. See “Atomicity” on page 223

cache

and “Atomic Commit and Two-Phase

A component that remembers recently

Commit (2PC)” on page 354.

used data in order to speed up future

reads of the same data. It is generally not

backpressure

complete: thus, if some data is missing

Forcing the sender of some data to slow

from the cache, it has to be fetched from

down because the recipient cannot keep

some underlying, slower data storage

Glossary | 553

CAP theorem

system that has a complete copy of the

ized view. See “Single-Object and Multi-

data.

Object Operations” on page 228 and

“Deriving several views from the same

CAP theorem

event log” on page 461.

A widely misunderstood theoretical result

that is not useful in practice. See “The

derived data

CAP theorem” on page 336.

A dataset that is created from some other

data through a repeatable process, which

causality

you could run again if necessary. Usually,

The dependency between events that ari‐

derived data is needed to speed up a par‐

ses when one thing “happens before”

ticular kind of read access to the data.

another thing in a system. For example, a

Indexes, caches, and materialized views

later event that is in response to an earlier

are examples of derived data. See the

event, or builds upon an earlier event, or

introduction to Part III.

should be understood in the light of an

earlier event. See “The “happens-before”

deterministic

relationship and concurrency” on page

Describing a function that always pro‐

186 and “Ordering and Causality” on page

duces the same output if you give it the

339.

same input. This means it cannot depend

on random numbers, the time of day, net‐

consensus

work communication, or other unpredict‐

A fundamental problem in distributed

able things.

computing, concerning getting several

nodes to agree on something (for exam‐

distributed

ple, which node should be the leader for a

Running on several nodes connected by a

database cluster). The problem is much

network. Characterized by partial failures:

harder than it seems at first glance. See

some part of the system may be broken

“Fault-Tolerant Consensus” on page 364.

while other parts are still working, and it

is often impossible for the software to

data warehouse

know what exactly is broken. See “Faults

A database in which data from several dif‐

and Partial Failures” on page 274.

ferent OLTP systems has been combined

and prepared to be used for analytics pur‐

durable

poses. See “Data Warehousing” on page

Storing data in a way such that you

91.

believe it will not be lost, even if various

faults occur. See “Durability” on page 226.

declarative

Describing the properties that something

ETL

should have, but not the exact steps for

Extract–Transform–Load. The process of

how to achieve it. In the context of quer‐

extracting data from a source database,

ies, a query optimizer takes a declarative

transforming it into a form that is more

query and decides how it should best be

suitable for analytic queries, and loading it

executed. See “Query Languages for Data”

into a data warehouse or batch processing

on page 42.

system. See “Data Warehousing” on page

91.

denormalize

To introduce some amount of redun‐

failover

dancy or duplication in a normalized

In systems that have a single leader, fail‐

dataset, typically in the form of a cache or

over is the process of moving the leader‐

index, in order to speed up reads. A

ship role from one node to another. See

denormalized value is a kind of precom‐

“Handling Node Outages” on page 156.

puted query result, similar to a material‐

554 | Glossary

locality

fault-tolerant

index

Able to recover automatically if some‐

A data structure that lets you efficiently

thing goes wrong (e.g., if a machine

search for all records that have a particu‐

crashes or a network link fails). See “Reli‐

lar value in a particular field. See “Data

ability” on page 6.

Structures That Power Your Database” on

page 70.

flow control

See backpressure.

isolation

In the context of transactions, describing

follower

the degree to which concurrently execut‐

A replica that does not directly accept any

ing transactions can interfere with each

writes from clients, but only processes

other. Serializable isolation provides the

data changes that it receives from a leader.

strongest guarantees, but weaker isolation

Also known as a secondary, slave, read

levels are also used. See “Isolation” on

replica, or hot standby. See “Leaders and

page 225.

Followers” on page 152.

join

full-text search

To bring together records that have some‐

Searching text by arbitrary keywords,

thing in common. Most commonly used

often with additional features such as

in the case where one record has a refer‐

matching similarly spelled words or syno‐

ence to another (a foreign key, a docu‐

nyms. A full-text index is a kind of secon‐

ment reference, an edge in a graph) and a

dary index that supports such queries. See

query needs to get the record that the ref‐

“Full-text search and fuzzy indexes” on

erence points to. See “Many-to-One and

page 88.

Many-to-Many Relationships” on page 33

graph

and “Reduce-Side Joins and Grouping” on

A data structure consisting of vertices

page 403.

(things that you can refer to, also known

leader

as nodes or entities) and edges (connec‐

When data or a service is replicated across

tions from one vertex to another, also

several nodes, the leader is the designated

known as relationships or arcs). See

replica that is allowed to make changes. A

“Graph-Like Data Models” on page 49.

leader may be elected through some pro‐

hash

tocol, or manually chosen by an adminis‐

A function that turns an input into a

trator. Also known as the primary or

random-looking number. The same input

master. See “Leaders and Followers” on

always returns the same number as out‐

page 152.

put. Two different inputs are very likely to

linearizable

have two different numbers as output,

Behaving as if there was only a single copy

although it is possible that two different

of data in the system, which is updated by

inputs produce the same output (this is

atomic operations. See “Linearizability”

called a collision). See “Partitioning by

on page 324.

Hash of Key” on page 203.

locality

idempotent

A performance optimization: putting sev‐

Describing an operation that can be safely

eral pieces of data in the same place if they

retried; if it is executed more than once, it

are frequently needed at the same time.

has the same effect as if it was only exe‐

See “Data locality for queries” on page 41.

cuted once. See “Idempotence” on page

478.

Glossary | 555

lock

lock

records. See “Transaction Processing or

A mechanism to ensure that only one

Analytics?” on page 90.

thread, node, or transaction can access

something, and anyone else who wants to

OLTP

access the same thing must wait until the

Online transaction processing. Access

lock is released. See “Two-Phase Locking

pattern characterized by fast queries that

(2PL)” on page 257 and “The leader and

read or write a small number of records,

the lock” on page 301.

usually indexed by key. See “Transaction

Processing or Analytics?” on page 90.

log An append-only file for storing data. A partitioning

write-ahead log is used to make a storage

Splitting up a large dataset or computa‐

engine resilient against crashes (see “Mak‐

tion that is too big for a single machine

ing B-trees reliable” on page 82), a log-

into smaller parts and spreading them

structured storage engine uses logs as its

across several machines. Also known as

primary storage format (see “SSTables

sharding. See Chapter 6.

and LSM-Trees” on page 76), a replication

percentile

log is used to copy writes from a leader to

A way of measuring the distribution of

followers (see “Leaders and Followers” on

values by counting how many values are

page 152), and an event log can represent

above or below some threshold. For

a data stream (see “Partitioned Logs” on

example, the 95th percentile response

page 446).

time during some period is the time t such

materialize

that 95% of requests in that period com‐

To perform a computation eagerly and

plete in less than t, and 5% take longer

write out its result, as opposed to calculat‐

than t. See “Describing Performance” on

ing it on demand when requested. See

page 13.

“Aggregation: Data Cubes and Material‐

primary key

ized Views” on page 101 and “Materializa‐

A value (typically a number or a string)

tion of Intermediate State” on page 419.

that uniquely identifies a record. In many

node

applications, primary keys are generated

An instance of some software running on

by the system when a record is created

a computer, which communicates with

(e.g., sequentially or randomly); they are

other nodes via a network in order to

not usually set by users. See also secondary

accomplish some task.

index.

normalized

quorum

Structured in such a way that there is no

The minimum number of nodes that need

redundancy or duplication. In a normal‐

to vote on an operation before it can be

ized database, when some piece of data

considered successful. See “Quorums for

changes, you only need to change it in one

reading and writing” on page 179.

place, not many copies in many different

rebalance

places. See “Many-to-One and Many-to-

To move data or services from one node

Many Relationships” on page 33.

to another in order to spread the load

OLAP

fairly. See “Rebalancing Partitions” on

Online analytic processing. Access pattern

page 209.

characterized by aggregating (e.g., count,

replication

sum, average) over a large number of

Keeping a copy of the same data on sev‐

eral nodes ( replicas) so that it remains

556 | Glossary

total order

accessible if a node becomes unreachable.

skew in “Timestamps for ordering events”

See Chapter 5.

on page 291.

schemaA description of the structure of some split brain

data, including its fields and datatypes.

A scenario in which two nodes simultane‐

Whether some data conforms to a schema

ously believe themselves to be the leader,

can be checked at various points in the

and which may cause system guarantees

data’s lifetime (see “Schema flexibility in

to be violated. See “Handling Node Out‐

the document model” on page 39), and a

ages” on page 156 and “The Truth Is

schema can change over time (see Chap‐

Defined by the Majority” on page 300.

ter 4).

stored procedure

secondary index

A way of encoding the logic of a transac‐

An additional data structure that is main‐

tion such that it can be entirely executed

tained alongside the primary data storage

on a database server, without communi‐

and which allows you to efficiently search

cating back and forth with a client during

for records that match a certain kind of

the transaction. See “Actual Serial Execu‐

condition. See “Other Indexing Struc‐

tion” on page 252.

tures” on page 85 and “Partitioning and

stream process

Secondary Indexes” on page 206.

A continually running computation that

serializable

consumes a never-ending stream of events

A guarantee that if several transactions

as input, and derives some output from it.

execute concurrently, they behave the

See Chapter 11.

same as if they had executed one at a time,

synchronous

in some serial order. See “Serializability”

The opposite of asynchronous.

on page 251.

system of record

shared-nothing

A system that holds the primary, authori‐

An architecture in which independent

tative version of some data, also known as

nodes—each with their own CPUs, mem‐

the source of truth. Changes are first writ‐

ory, and disks—are connected via a con‐

ten here, and other datasets may be

ventional network, in contrast to shared-

derived from the system of record. See the

memory or shared-disk architectures. See

introduction to Part III.

the introduction to Part II.

timeout

skew

One of the simplest ways of detecting a

1. Imbalanced load across partitions, such

fault, namely by observing the lack of a

that some partitions have lots of requests

response within some amount of time.

or data, and others have much less. Also

However, it is impossible to know

known as hot spots. See “Skewed Work‐

whether a timeout is due to a problem

loads and Relieving Hot Spots” on page

with the remote node, or an issue in the

205 and “Handling skew” on page 407.

network. See “Timeouts and Unbounded

2. A timing anomaly that causes events to

Delays” on page 281.

appear in an unexpected, nonsequential

total order

order. See the discussions of read skew in

A way of comparing things (e.g., time‐

“Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read”

stamps) that allows you to always say

on page 237, write skew in “Write Skew

which one of two things is greater and

and Phantoms” on page 246, and clock

which one is lesser. An ordering in which

Glossary | 557

transaction

some things are incomparable (you can‐

transaction. See “Atomic Commit and

not say which is greater or smaller) is

Two-Phase Commit (2PC)” on page 354.

called a partial order. See “The causal

order is not a total order” on page 341.

two-phase locking (2PL)

An algorithm for achieving serializable

transaction

isolation that works by a transaction

Grouping together several reads and

acquiring a lock on all data it reads or

writes into a logical unit, in order to sim‐

writes, and holding the lock until the end

plify error handling and concurrency

of the transaction. See “Two-Phase Lock‐

issues. See Chapter 7.

ing (2PL)” on page 257.

two-phase commit (2PC)

unbounded

An algorithm to ensure that several data‐

Not having any known upper limit or size.

base nodes either all commit or all abort a

The opposite of bounded.

558 | Glossary

Index

A

in stream processes, 466

aborts (transactions), 222, 224

aggregation pipeline query language, 48

in two-phase commit, 356

Agile, 22

performance of optimistic concurrency con‐

minimizing irreversibility, 414, 497

trol, 266

moving faster with confidence, 532

retrying aborted transactions, 231

Unix philosophy, 394

abstraction, 21, 27, 222, 266, 321

agreement, 365

access path (in network model), 37, 60

(see also consensus)

accidental complexity, removing, 21

Airflow (workflow scheduler), 402

accountability, 535

Ajax, 131

ACID properties (transactions), 90, 223

Akka (actor framework), 139

atomicity, 223, 228

algorithms

consistency, 224, 529

algorithm correctness, 308

durability, 226

B-trees, 79-83

isolation, 225, 228

for distributed systems, 306

acknowledgements (messaging), 445

hash indexes, 72-75

active/active replication (see multi-leader repli‐

mergesort, 76, 402, 405

cation)

red-black trees, 78

active/passive replication (see leader-based rep‐

SSTables and LSM-trees, 76-79

lication)

all-to-all replication topologies, 175

ActiveMQ (messaging), 137, 444

AllegroGraph (database), 50

distributed transaction support, 361

ALTER TABLE statement (SQL), 40, 111

ActiveRecord (object-relational mapper), 30,

Amazon

232

Dynamo (database), 177

actor model, 138

Amazon Web Services (AWS), 8

(see also message-passing)

Kinesis Streams (messaging), 448

comparison to Pregel model, 425

network reliability, 279

comparison to stream processing, 468

postmortems, 9

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (see

RedShift (database), 93

AMQP)

S3 (object storage), 398

aerospace systems, 6, 10, 305, 372

checking data integrity, 530

aggregation

amplification

data cubes and materialized views, 101

of bias, 534

in batch processes, 406

of failures, 364, 495

Index | 559

of tail latency, 16, 207

Apache Storm (see Storm)

write amplification, 84

Apache Tajo (see Tajo)

AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol),

Apache Tez (see Tez)

444

Apache Thrift (see Thrift)

(see also messaging systems)

Apache ZooKeeper (see ZooKeeper)

comparison to log-based messaging, 448,

Apama (stream analytics), 466

451

append-only B-trees, 82, 242

message ordering, 446

append-only files (see logs)

analytics, 90

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), 5,

comparison to transaction processing, 91

27

data warehousing (see data warehousing)

for batch processing, 403

parallel query execution in MPP databases,

for change streams, 456

415

for distributed transactions, 361

predictive (see predictive analytics)

for graph processing, 425

relation to batch processing, 411

for services, 131-136

schemas for, 93-95

(see also services)

snapshot isolation for queries, 238

evolvability, 136

stream analytics, 466

RESTful, 133

using MapReduce, analysis of user activity

SOAP, 133

events (example), 404

application state (see state)

anti-caching (in-memory databases), 89

approximate search (see similarity search)

anti-entropy, 178

archival storage, data from databases, 131

Apache ActiveMQ (see ActiveMQ)

arcs (see edges)

Apache Avro (see Avro)

arithmetic mean, 14

Apache Beam (see Beam)

ASCII text, 119, 395

Apache BookKeeper (see BookKeeper)

ASN.1 (schema language), 127

Apache Cassandra (see Cassandra)

asynchronous networks, 278, 553

Apache CouchDB (see CouchDB)

comparison to synchronous networks, 284

Apache Curator (see Curator)

formal model, 307

Apache Drill (see Drill)

asynchronous replication, 154, 553

Apache Flink (see Flink)

conflict detection, 172

Apache Giraph (see Giraph)

data loss on failover, 157

Apache Hadoop (see Hadoop)

reads from asynchronous follower, 162

Apache HAWQ (see HAWQ)

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), 285

Apache HBase (see HBase)

atomic broadcast (see total order broadcast)

Apache Helix (see Helix)

atomic clocks (caesium clocks), 294, 295

Apache Hive (see Hive)

(see also clocks)

Apache Impala (see Impala)

atomicity (concurrency), 553

Apache Jena (see Jena)

atomic increment-and-get, 351

Apache Kafka (see Kafka)

compare-and-set, 245, 327

Apache Lucene (see Lucene)

(see also compare-and-set operations)

Apache MADlib (see MADlib)

replicated operations, 246

Apache Mahout (see Mahout)

write operations, 243

Apache Oozie (see Oozie)

atomicity (transactions), 223, 228, 553

Apache Parquet (see Parquet)

atomic commit, 353

Apache Qpid (see Qpid)

avoiding, 523, 528

Apache Samza (see Samza)

blocking and nonblocking, 359

Apache Solr (see Solr)

in stream processing, 360, 477

Apache Spark (see Spark)

maintaining derived data, 453

560 | Index

for multi-object transactions, 229

dataflow engines, 421-423

for single-object writes, 230

fault tolerance, 406, 414, 422, 442

auditability, 528-533

for data integration, 494-498

designing for, 531

graphs and iterative processing, 424-426

self-auditing systems, 530

high-level APIs and languages, 403, 426-429

through immutability, 460

log-based messaging and, 451

tools for auditable data systems, 532

maintaining derived state, 495

availability, 8

MapReduce and distributed filesystems,

(see also fault tolerance)

397-413

in CAP theorem, 337

(see also MapReduce)

in service level agreements (SLAs), 15

measuring performance, 13, 390

Avro (data format), 122-127

outputs, 411-413

code generation, 127

key-value stores, 412

dynamically generated schemas, 126

search indexes, 411

object container files, 125, 131, 414

using Unix tools (example), 391-394

reader determining writer’s schema, 125

Bayou (database), 522

schema evolution, 123

Beam (dataflow library), 498

use in Hadoop, 414

bias, 534

awk (Unix tool), 391

big ball of mud, 20

AWS (see Amazon Web Services)

Bigtable data model, 41, 99

Azure (see Microsoft)

binary data encodings, 115-128

Avro, 122-127

B

MessagePack, 116-117

B-trees (indexes), 79-83

Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121

append-only/copy-on-write variants, 82,

binary encoding

242

based on schemas, 127

branching factor, 81

by network drivers, 128

comparison to LSM-trees, 83-85

binary strings, lack of support in JSON and

crash recovery, 82

XML, 114

growing by splitting a page, 81

BinaryProtocol encoding (Thrift), 118

optimizations, 82

Bitcask (storage engine), 72

similarity to dynamic partitioning, 212

crash recovery, 74

backpressure, 441, 553

Bitcoin (cryptocurrency), 532

in TCP, 282

Byzantine fault tolerance, 305

backups

concurrency bugs in exchanges, 233

database snapshot for replication, 156

bitmap indexes, 97

integrity of, 530

blockchains, 532

snapshot isolation for, 238

Byzantine fault tolerance, 305

use for ETL processes, 405

blocking atomic commit, 359

backward compatibility, 112

Bloom (programming language), 504

BASE, contrast to ACID, 223

Bloom filter (algorithm), 79, 466

bash shell (Unix), 70, 395, 503

BookKeeper (replicated log), 372

batch processing, 28, 389-431, 553

Bottled Water (change data capture), 455

combining with stream processing

bounded datasets, 430, 439, 553

lambda architecture, 497

(see also batch processing)

unifying technologies, 498

bounded delays, 553

comparison to MPP databases, 414-418

in networks, 285

comparison to stream processing, 464

process pauses, 298

comparison to Unix, 413-414

broadcast hash joins, 409

Index | 561

brokerless messaging, 442

causality, 554

Brubeck (metrics aggregator), 442

causal ordering, 339-343

BTM (transaction coordinator), 356

linearizability and, 342

bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model, 425

total order consistent with, 344, 345

bursty network traffic patterns, 285

consistency with, 344-347

business data processing, 28, 90, 390

consistent snapshots, 340

byte sequence, encoding data in, 112

happens-before relationship, 186

Byzantine faults, 304-306, 307, 553

in serializable transactions, 262-265

Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, 305, 532

mismatch with clocks, 292

Byzantine Generals Problem, 304

ordering events to capture, 493

consensus algorithms and, 366

violations of, 165, 176, 292, 340

with synchronized clocks, 294

C

CEP (see complex event processing)

caches, 89, 553

certificate transparency, 532

and materialized views, 101

chain replication, 155

as derived data, 386, 499-504

linearizable reads, 351

database as cache of transaction log, 460

change data capture, 160, 454

in CPUs, 99, 338, 428

API support for change streams, 456

invalidation and maintenance, 452, 467

comparison to event sourcing, 457

linearizability, 324

implementing, 454

CAP theorem, 336-338, 554

initial snapshot, 455

Cascading (batch processing), 419, 427

log compaction, 456

hash joins, 409

changelogs, 460

workflows, 403

change data capture, 454

cascading failures, 9, 214, 281

for operator state, 479

Cascalog (batch processing), 60

generating with triggers, 455

Cassandra (database)

in stream joins, 474

column-family data model, 41, 99

log compaction, 456

compaction strategy, 79

maintaining derived state, 452

compound primary key, 204

Chaos Monkey, 7, 280

gossip protocol, 216

checkpointing

hash partitioning, 203-205

in batch processors, 422, 426

last-write-wins conflict resolution, 186, 292

in high-performance computing, 275

leaderless replication, 177

in stream processors, 477, 523

linearizability, lack of, 335

chronicle data model, 458

log-structured storage, 78

circuit-switched networks, 284

multi-datacenter support, 184

circular buffers, 450

partitioning scheme, 213

circular replication topologies, 175

secondary indexes, 207

clickstream data, analysis of, 404

sloppy quorums, 184

clients

cat (Unix tool), 391

calling services, 131

causal context, 191

pushing state changes to, 512

(see also causal dependencies)

request routing, 214

causal dependencies, 186-191

stateful and offline-capable, 170, 511

capturing, 191, 342, 494, 514

clocks, 287-299

by total ordering, 493

atomic (caesium) clocks, 294, 295

causal ordering, 339

confidence interval, 293-295

in transactions, 262

for global snapshots, 294

sending message to friends (example), 494

logical (see logical clocks)

562 | Index

skew, 291-294, 334

CompactProtocol encoding (Thrift), 119

slewing, 289

compare-and-set operations, 245, 327

synchronization and accuracy, 289-291

implementing locks, 370

synchronization using GPS, 287, 290, 294,

implementing uniqueness constraints, 331

295

implementing with total order broadcast,

time-of-day versus monotonic clocks, 288

350

timestamping events, 471

relation to consensus, 335, 350, 352, 374

cloud computing, 146, 275

relation to transactions, 230

need for service discovery, 372

compatibility, 112, 128

network glitches, 279

calling services, 136

shared resources, 284

properties of encoding formats, 139

single-machine reliability, 8

using databases, 129-131

Cloudera Impala (see Impala)

using message-passing, 138

clustered indexes, 86

compensating transactions, 355, 461, 526

CODASYL model, 36

complex event processing (CEP), 465

(see also network model)

complexity

code generation

distilling in theoretical models, 310

with Avro, 127

hiding using abstraction, 27

with Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 118

of software systems, managing, 20

with WSDL, 133

composing data systems (see unbundling data‐

collaborative editing

bases)

multi-leader replication and, 170

compute-intensive applications, 3, 275

column families (Bigtable), 41, 99

concatenated indexes, 87

column-oriented storage, 95-101

in Cassandra, 204

column compression, 97

Concord (stream processor), 466

distinction between column families and, 99

concurrency

in batch processors, 428

actor programming model, 138, 468

Parquet, 96, 131, 414

(see also message-passing)

sort order in, 99-100

bugs from weak transaction isolation, 233

vectorized processing, 99, 428

conflict resolution, 171, 174

writing to, 101

detecting concurrent writes, 184-191

comma-separated values (see CSV)

dual writes, problems with, 453

command query responsibility segregation

happens-before relationship, 186

(CQRS), 462

in replicated systems, 161-191, 324-338

commands (event sourcing), 459

lost updates, 243

commits (transactions), 222

multi-version concurrency control

atomic commit, 354-355

(MVCC), 239

(see also atomicity; transactions)

optimistic concurrency control, 261

read committed isolation, 234

ordering of operations, 326, 341

three-phase commit (3PC), 359

reducing, through event logs, 351, 462, 507

two-phase commit (2PC), 355-359

time and relativity, 187

commutative operations, 246

transaction isolation, 225

compaction

write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251

of changelogs, 456

conflict-free replicated datatypes (CRDTs), 174

(see also log compaction)

conflicts

for stream operator state, 479

conflict detection, 172

of log-structured storage, 73

causal dependencies, 186, 342

issues with, 84

in consensus algorithms, 368

size-tiered and leveled approaches, 79

in leaderless replication, 184

Index | 563

in log-based systems, 351, 521

crash recovery, 82

in nonlinearizable systems, 343

enforcing constraints (see constraints)

in serializable snapshot isolation (SSI),

eventual, 162, 322

264

(see also eventual consistency)

in two-phase commit, 357, 364

in ACID transactions, 224, 529

conflict resolution

in CAP theorem, 337

automatic conflict resolution, 174

linearizability, 324-338

by aborting transactions, 261

meanings of, 224

by apologizing, 527

monotonic reads, 164-165

convergence, 172-174

of secondary indexes, 231, 241, 354, 491,

in leaderless systems, 190

500

last write wins (LWW), 186, 292

ordering guarantees, 339-352

using atomic operations, 246

read-after-write, 162-164

using custom logic, 173

sequential, 351

determining what is a conflict, 174, 522

strong (see linearizability)

in multi-leader replication, 171-175

timeliness and integrity, 524

avoiding conflicts, 172

using quorums, 181, 334

lost updates, 242-246

consistent hashing, 204

materializing, 251

consistent prefix reads, 165

relation to operation ordering, 339

constraints (databases), 225, 248

write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251

asynchronously checked, 526

congestion (networks)

coordination avoidance, 527

avoidance, 282

ensuring idempotence, 519

limiting accuracy of clocks, 293

in log-based systems, 521-524

queueing delays, 282

across multiple partitions, 522

consensus, 321, 364-375, 554

in two-phase commit, 355, 357

algorithms, 366-368

relation to consensus, 374, 521

preventing split brain, 367

relation to event ordering, 347

safety and liveness properties, 365

requiring linearizability, 330

using linearizable operations, 351

Consul (service discovery), 372

cost of, 369

consumers (message streams), 137, 440

distributed transactions, 352-375

backpressure, 441

in practice, 360-364

consumer offsets in logs, 449

two-phase commit, 354-359

failures, 445, 449

XA transactions, 361-364

fan-out, 11, 445, 448

impossibility of, 353

load balancing, 444, 448

membership and coordination services,

not keeping up with producers, 441, 450,

370-373

502

relation to compare-and-set, 335, 350, 352,

context switches, 14, 297

374

convergence (conflict resolution), 172-174, 322

relation to replication, 155, 349

coordination

relation to uniqueness constraints, 521

avoidance, 527

consistency, 224, 524

cross-datacenter, 168, 493

across different databases, 157, 452, 462, 492

cross-partition ordering, 256, 294, 348, 523

causal, 339-348, 493

services, 330, 370-373

consistent prefix reads, 165-167

coordinator (in 2PC), 356

consistent snapshots, 156, 237-242, 294,

failure, 358

455, 500

in XA transactions, 361-364

(see also snapshots)

recovery, 363

564 | Index

copy-on-write (B-trees), 82, 242

Crunch (batch processing), 419, 427

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker

hash joins, 409

Architecture), 134

sharded joins, 408

correctness, 6

workflows, 403

auditability, 528-533

cryptography

Byzantine fault tolerance, 305, 532

defense against attackers, 306

dealing with partial failures, 274

end-to-end encryption and authentication,

in log-based systems, 521-524

519, 543

of algorithm within system model, 308

proving integrity of data, 532

of compensating transactions, 355

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), 44

of consensus, 368

CSV (comma-separated values), 70, 114, 396

of derived data, 497, 531

Curator (ZooKeeper recipes), 330, 371

of immutable data, 461

curl (Unix tool), 135, 397

of personal data, 535, 540

cursor stability, 243

of time, 176, 289-295

Cypher (query language), 52

of transactions, 225, 515, 529

comparison to SPARQL, 59

timeliness and integrity, 524-528

corruption of data

D

detecting, 519, 530-533

data corruption (see corruption of data)

due to pathological memory access, 529

data cubes, 102

due to radiation, 305

data formats (see encoding)

due to split brain, 158, 302

data integration, 490-498, 543

due to weak transaction isolation, 233

batch and stream processing, 494-498

formalization in consensus, 366

lambda architecture, 497

integrity as absence of, 524

maintaining derived state, 495

network packets, 306

reprocessing data, 496

on disks, 227

unifying, 498

preventing using write-ahead logs, 82

by unbundling databases, 499-515

recovering from, 414, 460

comparison to federated databases, 501

Couchbase (database)

combining tools by deriving data, 490-494

durability, 89

derived data versus distributed transac‐

hash partitioning, 203-204, 211

tions, 492

rebalancing, 213

limits of total ordering, 493

request routing, 216

ordering events to capture causality, 493

CouchDB (database)

reasoning about dataflows, 491

B-tree storage, 242

need for, 385

change feed, 456

data lakes, 415

document data model, 31

data locality (see locality)

join support, 34

data models, 27-64

MapReduce support, 46, 400

graph-like models, 49-63

replication, 170, 173

Datalog language, 60-63

covering indexes, 86

property graphs, 50

CPUs

RDF and triple-stores, 55-59

cache coherence and memory barriers, 338

query languages, 42-48

caching and pipelining, 99, 428

relational model versus document model,

increasing parallelism, 43

28-42

CRDTs (see conflict-free replicated datatypes)

data protection regulations, 542

CREATE INDEX statement (SQL), 85, 500

data systems, 3

credit rating agencies, 535

about, 4

Index | 565

concerns when designing, 5

observing derived state, 509-515

future of, 489-544

datacenters

correctness, constraints, and integrity,

geographically distributed, 145, 164, 278,

515-533

493

data integration, 490-498

multi-tenancy and shared resources, 284

unbundling databases, 499-515

network architecture, 276

heterogeneous, keeping in sync, 452

network faults, 279

maintainability, 18-22

replication across multiple, 169

possible faults in, 221

leaderless replication, 184

reliability, 6-10

multi-leader replication, 168, 335

hardware faults, 7

dataflow, 128-139, 504-509

human errors, 9

correctness of dataflow systems, 525

importance of, 10

differential, 504

software errors, 8

message-passing, 136-139

scalability, 10-18

reasoning about, 491

unreliable clocks, 287-299

through databases, 129

data warehousing, 91-95, 554

through services, 131-136

comparison to data lakes, 415

dataflow engines, 421-423

ETL (extract-transform-load), 92, 416, 452

comparison to stream processing, 464

keeping data systems in sync, 452

directed acyclic graphs (DAG), 424

schema design, 93

partitioning, approach to, 429

slowly changing dimension (SCD), 476

support for declarative queries, 427

data-intensive applications, 3

Datalog (query language), 60-63

database triggers (see triggers)

datatypes

database-internal distributed transactions, 360,

binary strings in XML and JSON, 114

364, 477

conflict-free, 174

databases

in Avro encodings, 122

archival storage, 131

in Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 121

comparison of message brokers to, 443

numbers in XML and JSON, 114

dataflow through, 129

Datomic (database)

end-to-end argument for, 519-520

B-tree storage, 242

checking integrity, 531

data model, 50, 57

inside-out, 504

Datalog query language, 60

(see also unbundling databases)

excision (deleting data), 463

output from batch workflows, 412

languages for transactions, 255

relation to event streams, 451-464

serial execution of transactions, 253

(see also changelogs)

deadlocks

API support for change streams, 456,

detection, in two-phase commit (2PC), 364

506

in two-phase locking (2PL), 258

change data capture, 454-457

Debezium (change data capture), 455

event sourcing, 457-459

declarative languages, 42, 554

keeping systems in sync, 452-453

Bloom, 504

philosophy of immutable events,

CSS and XSL, 44

459-464

Cypher, 52

unbundling, 499-515

Datalog, 60

composing data storage technologies,

for batch processing, 427

499-504

recursive SQL queries, 53

designing applications around dataflow,

relational algebra and SQL, 42

504-509

SPARQL, 59

566 | Index

delays

issues with failover, 157

bounded network delays, 285

limitations of distributed transactions, 363

bounded process pauses, 298

multi-datacenter, 169, 335

unbounded network delays, 282

network problems, 277-286

unbounded process pauses, 296

quorums, relying on, 301

deleting data, 463

reasons for using, 145, 151

denormalization (data representation), 34, 554

synchronized clocks, relying on, 291-295

costs, 39

system models, 306-310

in derived data systems, 386

use of clocks and time, 287

materialized views, 101

distributed transactions (see transactions)

updating derived data, 228, 231, 490

Django (web framework), 232

versus normalization, 462

DNS (Domain Name System), 216, 372

derived data, 386, 439, 554

Docker (container manager), 506

from change data capture, 454

document data model, 30-42

in event sourcing, 458-458

comparison to relational model, 38-42

maintaining derived state through logs,

document references, 38, 403

452-457, 459-463

document-oriented databases, 31

observing, by subscribing to streams, 512

many-to-many relationships and joins, 36

outputs of batch and stream processing, 495

multi-object transactions, need for, 231

through application code, 505

versus relational model

versus distributed transactions, 492

convergence of models, 41

deterministic operations, 255, 274, 554

data locality, 41

accidental nondeterminism, 423

document-partitioned indexes, 206, 217, 411

and fault tolerance, 423, 426

domain-driven design (DDD), 457

and idempotence, 478, 492

DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device),

computing derived data, 495, 526, 531

153

in state machine replication, 349, 452, 458

drift (clocks), 289

joins, 476

Drill (query engine), 93

DevOps, 394

Druid (database), 461

differential dataflow, 504

Dryad (dataflow engine), 421

dimension tables, 94

dual writes, problems with, 452, 507

dimensional modeling (see star schemas)

duplicates, suppression of, 517

directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), 424

(see also idempotence)

dirty reads (transaction isolation), 234

using a unique ID, 518, 522

dirty writes (transaction isolation), 235

durability (transactions), 226, 554

discrimination, 534

duration (time), 287

disks (see hard disks)

measurement with monotonic clocks, 288

distributed actor frameworks, 138

dynamic partitioning, 212

distributed filesystems, 398-399

dynamically typed languages

decoupling from query engines, 417

analogy to schema-on-read, 40

indiscriminately dumping data into, 415

code generation and, 127

use by MapReduce, 402

Dynamo-style databases (see leaderless replica‐

distributed systems, 273-312, 554

tion)

Byzantine faults, 304-306

cloud versus supercomputing, 275

E

detecting network faults, 280

edges (in graphs), 49, 403

faults and partial failures, 274-277

property graph model, 50

formalization of consensus, 365

edit distance (full-text search), 88

impossibility results, 338, 353

effectively-once semantics, 476, 516

Index | 567

(see also exactly-once semantics)

Etherpad (collaborative editor), 170

preservation of integrity, 525

ethics, 533-543

elastic systems, 17

code of ethics and professional practice, 533

Elasticsearch (search server)

legislation and self-regulation, 542

document-partitioned indexes, 207

predictive analytics, 533-536

partition rebalancing, 211

amplifying bias, 534

percolator (stream search), 467

feedback loops, 536

usage example, 4

privacy and tracking, 536-543

use of Lucene, 79

consent and freedom of choice, 538

ElephantDB (database), 413

data as assets and power, 540

Elm (programming language), 504, 512

meaning of privacy, 539

encodings (data formats), 111-128

surveillance, 537

Avro, 122-127

respect, dignity, and agency, 543, 544

binary variants of JSON and XML, 115

unintended consequences, 533, 536

compatibility, 112

ETL (extract-transform-load), 92, 405, 452, 554

calling services, 136

use of Hadoop for, 416

using databases, 129-131

event sourcing, 457-459

using message-passing, 138

commands and events, 459

defined, 113

comparison to change data capture, 457

JSON, XML, and CSV, 114

comparison to lambda architecture, 497

language-specific formats, 113

deriving current state from event log, 458

merits of schemas, 127

immutability and auditability, 459, 531

representations of data, 112

large, reliable data systems, 519, 526

Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121

Event Store (database), 458

end-to-end argument, 277, 519-520

event streams (see streams)

checking integrity, 531

events, 440

publish/subscribe streams, 512

deciding on total order of, 493

enrichment (stream), 473

deriving views from event log, 461

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), 134

difference to commands, 459

entities (see vertices)

event time versus processing time, 469, 477,

epoch (consensus algorithms), 368

498

epoch (Unix timestamps), 288

immutable, advantages of, 460, 531

equi-joins, 403

ordering to capture causality, 493

erasure coding (error correction), 398

reads as, 513

Erlang OTP (actor framework), 139

stragglers, 470, 498

error handling

timestamp of, in stream processing, 471

for network faults, 280

EventSource (browser API), 512

in transactions, 231

eventual consistency, 152, 162, 308, 322

error-correcting codes, 277, 398

(see also conflicts)

Esper (CEP engine), 466

and perpetual inconsistency, 525

etcd (coordination service), 370-373

evolvability, 21, 111

linearizable operations, 333

calling services, 136

locks and leader election, 330

graph-structured data, 52

quorum reads, 351

of databases, 40, 129-131, 461, 497

service discovery, 372

of message-passing, 138

use of Raft algorithm, 349, 353

reprocessing data, 496, 498

Ethereum (blockchain), 532

schema evolution in Avro, 123

Ethernet (networks), 276, 278, 285

schema evolution in Thrift and Protocol

packet checksums, 306, 519

Buffers, 120

568 | Index

schema-on-read, 39, 111, 128

of distributed transactions, 362-364

exactly-once semantics, 360, 476, 516

transaction atomicity, 223, 354-361

parity with batch processors, 498

faults, 6

preservation of integrity, 525

Byzantine faults, 304-306

exclusive mode (locks), 258

failures versus, 7

eXtended Architecture transactions (see XA

handled by transactions, 221

transactions)

handling in supercomputers and cloud

extract-transform-load (see ETL)

computing, 275

hardware, 7

F

in batch processing versus distributed data‐

Facebook

bases, 417

Presto (query engine), 93

in distributed systems, 274-277

React, Flux, and Redux (user interface libra‐

introducing deliberately, 7, 280

ries), 512

network faults, 279-281

social graphs, 49

asymmetric faults, 300

Wormhole (change data capture), 455

detecting, 280

fact tables, 93

tolerance of, in multi-leader replication,

failover, 157, 554

169

(see also leader-based replication)

software errors, 8

in leaderless replication, absence of, 178

tolerating (see fault tolerance)

leader election, 301, 348, 352

federated databases, 501

potential problems, 157

fence (CPU instruction), 338

failures

fencing (preventing split brain), 158, 302-304

amplification by distributed transactions,

generating fencing tokens, 349, 370

364, 495

properties of fencing tokens, 308

failure detection, 280

stream processors writing to databases, 478,

automatic rebalancing causing cascading

517

failures, 214

Fibre Channel (networks), 398

perfect failure detectors, 359

field tags (Thrift and Protocol Buffers), 119-121

timeouts and unbounded delays, 282,

file descriptors (Unix), 395

284

financial data, 460

using ZooKeeper, 371

Firebase (database), 456

faults versus, 7

Flink (processing framework), 421-423

partial failures in distributed systems,

dataflow APIs, 427

275-277, 310

fault tolerance, 422, 477, 479

fan-out (messaging systems), 11, 445

Gelly API (graph processing), 425

fault tolerance, 6-10, 555

integration of batch and stream processing,

abstractions for, 321

495, 498

formalization in consensus, 365-369

machine learning, 428

use of replication, 367

query optimizer, 427

human fault tolerance, 414

stream processing, 466

in batch processing, 406, 414, 422, 425

flow control, 282, 441, 555

in log-based systems, 520, 524-526

FLP result (on consensus), 353

in stream processing, 476-479

FlumeJava (dataflow library), 403, 427

atomic commit, 477

followers, 152, 555

idempotence, 478

(see also leader-based replication)

maintaining derived state, 495

foreign keys, 38, 403

microbatching and checkpointing, 477

forward compatibility, 112

rebuilding state after a failure, 478

forward decay (algorithm), 16

Index | 569

Fossil (version control system), 463

(see also MapReduce)

shunning (deleting data), 463

building search indexes, 411

FoundationDB (database)

task preemption, 418

serializable transactions, 261, 265, 364

Pregel (graph processing), 425

fractal trees, 83

Spanner (see Spanner)

full table scans, 403

TrueTime (clock API), 294

full-text search, 555

gossip protocol, 216

and fuzzy indexes, 88

government use of data, 541

building search indexes, 411

GPS (Global Positioning System)

Lucene storage engine, 79

use for clock synchronization, 287, 290, 294,

functional reactive programming (FRP), 504

295

functional requirements, 22

GraphChi (graph processing), 426

futures (asynchronous operations), 135

graphs, 555

fuzzy search (see similarity search)

as data models, 49-63

example of graph-structured data, 49

G

property graphs, 50

garbage collection

RDF and triple-stores, 55-59

immutability and, 463

versus the network model, 60

process pauses for, 14, 296-299, 301

processing and analysis, 424-426

(see also process pauses)

fault tolerance, 425

genome analysis, 63, 429

Pregel processing model, 425

geographically distributed datacenters, 145,

query languages

164, 278, 493

Cypher, 52

geospatial indexes, 87

Datalog, 60-63

Giraph (graph processing), 425

recursive SQL queries, 53

Git (version control system), 174, 342, 463

SPARQL, 59-59

GitHub, postmortems, 157, 158, 309

Gremlin (graph query language), 50

global indexes (see term-partitioned indexes)

grep (Unix tool), 392

GlusterFS (distributed filesystem), 398

GROUP BY clause (SQL), 406

GNU Coreutils (Linux), 394

grouping records in MapReduce, 406

GoldenGate (change data capture), 161, 170,

handling skew, 407

455

(see also Oracle)

H

Google

Hadoop (data infrastructure)

Bigtable (database)

comparison to distributed databases, 390

data model (see Bigtable data model)

comparison to MPP databases, 414-418

partitioning scheme, 199, 202

comparison to Unix, 413-414, 499

storage layout, 78

diverse processing models in ecosystem, 417

Chubby (lock service), 370

HDFS distributed filesystem (see HDFS)

Cloud Dataflow (stream processor), 466,

higher-level tools, 403

477, 498

join algorithms, 403-410

(see also Beam)

(see also MapReduce)

Cloud Pub/Sub (messaging), 444, 448

MapReduce (see MapReduce)

Docs (collaborative editor), 170

YARN (see YARN)

Dremel (query engine), 93, 96

happens-before relationship, 340

FlumeJava (dataflow library), 403, 427

capturing, 187

GFS (distributed file system), 398

concurrency and, 186

gRPC (RPC framework), 135

hard disks

MapReduce (batch processing), 390

access patterns, 84

570 | Index

detecting corruption, 519, 530

high-performance computing (HPC), 275

faults in, 7, 227

hinted handoff, 183

sequential write throughput, 75, 450

histograms, 16

hardware faults, 7

Hive (query engine), 419, 427

hash indexes, 72-75

for data warehouses, 93

broadcast hash joins, 409

HCatalog and metastore, 410

partitioned hash joins, 409

map-side joins, 409

hash partitioning, 203-205, 217

query optimizer, 427

consistent hashing, 204

skewed joins, 408

problems with hash mod N, 210

workflows, 403

range queries, 204

Hollerith machines, 390

suitable hash functions, 203

hopping windows (stream processing), 472

with fixed number of partitions, 210

(see also windows)

HAWQ (database), 428

horizontal scaling (see scaling out)

HBase (database)

HornetQ (messaging), 137, 444

bug due to lack of fencing, 302

distributed transaction support, 361

bulk loading, 413

hot spots, 201

column-family data model, 41, 99

due to celebrities, 205

dynamic partitioning, 212

for time-series data, 203

key-range partitioning, 202

in batch processing, 407

log-structured storage, 78

relieving, 205

request routing, 216

hot standbys (see leader-based replication)

size-tiered compaction, 79

HTTP, use in APIs (see services)

use of HDFS, 417

human errors, 9, 279, 414

use of ZooKeeper, 370

HyperDex (database), 88

HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System),

HyperLogLog (algorithm), 466

398-399

(see also distributed filesystems)

I

checking data integrity, 530

I/O operations, waiting for, 297

decoupling from query engines, 417

IBM

indiscriminately dumping data into, 415

DB2 (database)

metadata about datasets, 410

distributed transaction support, 361

NameNode, 398

recursive query support, 54

use by Flink, 479

serializable isolation, 242, 257

use by HBase, 212

XML and JSON support, 30, 42

use by MapReduce, 402

electromechanical card-sorting machines,

HdrHistogram (numerical library), 16

390

head (Unix tool), 392

IMS (database), 36

head vertex (property graphs), 51

imperative query APIs, 46

head-of-line blocking, 15

InfoSphere Streams (CEP engine), 466

heap files (databases), 86

MQ (messaging), 444

Helix (cluster manager), 216

distributed transaction support, 361

heterogeneous distributed transactions, 360,

System R (database), 222

364

WebSphere (messaging), 137

heuristic decisions (in 2PC), 363

idempotence, 134, 478, 555

Hibernate (object-relational mapper), 30

by giving operations unique IDs, 518, 522

hierarchical model, 36

idempotent operations, 517

high availability (see fault tolerance)

immutability

high-frequency trading, 290, 299

advantages of, 460, 531

Index | 571

deriving state from event log, 459-464

B-trees, 79-83

for crash recovery, 75

building in batch processes, 411

in B-trees, 82, 242

clustered, 86

in event sourcing, 457

comparison of B-trees and LSM-trees, 83-85

inputs to Unix commands, 397

concatenated, 87

limitations of, 463

covering (with included columns), 86

Impala (query engine)

creating, 500

for data warehouses, 93

full-text search, 88

hash joins, 409

geospatial, 87

native code generation, 428

hash, 72-75

use of HDFS, 417

index-range locking, 260

impedance mismatch, 29

multi-column, 87

imperative languages, 42

partitioning and secondary indexes,

setting element styles (example), 45

206-209, 217

in doubt (transaction status), 358

secondary, 85

holding locks, 362

(see also secondary indexes)

orphaned transactions, 363

problems with dual writes, 452, 491

in-memory databases, 88

SSTables and LSM-trees, 76-79

durability, 227

updating when data changes, 452, 467

serial transaction execution, 253

Industrial Revolution, 541

incidents

InfiniBand (networks), 285

cascading failures, 9

InfiniteGraph (database), 50

crashes due to leap seconds, 290

InnoDB (storage engine)

data corruption and financial losses due to

clustered index on primary key, 86

concurrency bugs, 233

not preventing lost updates, 245

data corruption on hard disks, 227

preventing write skew, 248, 257

data loss due to last-write-wins, 173, 292

serializable isolation, 257

data on disks unreadable, 309

snapshot isolation support, 239

deleted items reappearing, 174

inside-out databases, 504

disclosure of sensitive data due to primary

(see also unbundling databases)

key reuse, 157

integrating different data systems (see data

errors in transaction serializability, 529

integration)

gigabit network interface with 1 Kb/s

integrity, 524

throughput, 311

coordination-avoiding data systems, 528

network faults, 279

correctness of dataflow systems, 525

network interface dropping only inbound

in consensus formalization, 365

packets, 279

integrity checks, 530

network partitions and whole-datacenter

(see also auditing)

failures, 275

end-to-end, 519, 531

poor handling of network faults, 280

use of snapshot isolation, 238

sending message to ex-partner, 494

maintaining despite software bugs, 529

sharks biting undersea cables, 279

Interface Definition Language (IDL), 117, 122

split brain due to 1-minute packet delay,

intermediate state, materialization of, 420-423

158, 279

internet services, systems for implementing,

vibrations in server rack, 14

275

violation of uniqueness constraint, 529

invariants, 225

indexes, 71, 555

(see also constraints)

and snapshot isolation, 241

inversion of control, 396

as derived data, 386, 499-504

IP (Internet Protocol)

572 | Index

unreliability of, 277

MapReduce reduce-side joins, 403-408

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network),

handling skew, 407

284

sort-merge joins, 405

isolation (in transactions), 225, 228, 555

parallel execution of, 415

correctness and, 515

secondary indexes and, 85

for single-object writes, 230

stream joins, 472-476

serializability, 251-266

stream-stream join, 473

actual serial execution, 252-256

stream-table join, 473

serializable snapshot isolation (SSI),

table-table join, 474

261-266

time-dependence of, 475

two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261

support in document databases, 42

violating, 228

JOTM (transaction coordinator), 356

weak isolation levels, 233-251

JSON

preventing lost updates, 242-246

Avro schema representation, 122

read committed, 234-237

binary variants, 115

snapshot isolation, 237-242

for application data, issues with, 114

iterative processing, 424-426

in relational databases, 30, 42

representing a résumé (example), 31

J

Juttle (query language), 504

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

distributed transaction support, 361

K

network drivers, 128

k-nearest neighbors, 429

Java Enterprise Edition (EE), 134, 356, 361

Kafka (messaging), 137, 448

Java Message Service (JMS), 444

Kafka Connect (database integration), 457,

(see also messaging systems)

461

comparison to log-based messaging, 448,

Kafka Streams (stream processor), 466, 467

451

fault tolerance, 479

distributed transaction support, 361

leader-based replication, 153

message ordering, 446

log compaction, 456, 467

Java Transaction API (JTA), 355, 361

message offsets, 447, 478

Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

request routing, 216

bytecode generation, 428

transaction support, 477

garbage collection pauses, 296

usage example, 4

process reuse in batch processors, 422

Ketama (partitioning library), 213

JavaScript

key-value stores, 70

in MapReduce querying, 46

as batch process output, 412

setting element styles (example), 45

hash indexes, 72-75

use in advanced queries, 48

in-memory, 89

Jena (RDF framework), 57

partitioning, 201-205

Jepsen (fault tolerance testing), 515

by hash of key, 203, 217

jitter (network delay), 284

by key range, 202, 217

joins, 555

dynamic partitioning, 212

by index lookup, 403

skew and hot spots, 205

expressing as relational operators, 427

Kryo (Java), 113

in relational and document databases, 34

Kubernetes (cluster manager), 418, 506

MapReduce map-side joins, 408-410

broadcast hash joins, 409

L

merge joins, 410

lambda architecture, 497

partitioned hash joins, 409

Lamport timestamps, 345

Index | 573

Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 64

need for fencing, 302

last write wins (LWW), 173, 334

ledgers, 460

discarding concurrent writes, 186

distributed ledger technologies, 532

problems with, 292

legacy systems, maintenance of, 18

prone to lost updates, 246

less (Unix tool), 397

late binding, 396

LevelDB (storage engine), 78

latency

leveled compaction, 79

instability under two-phase locking, 259

Levenshtein automata, 88

network latency and resource utilization,

limping (partial failure), 311

286

linearizability, 324-338, 555

response time versus, 14

cost of, 335-338

tail latency, 15, 207

CAP theorem, 336

leader-based replication, 152-161

memory on multi-core CPUs, 338

(see also replication)

definition, 325-329

failover, 157, 301

implementing with total order broadcast,

handling node outages, 156

350

implementation of replication logs

in ZooKeeper, 370

change data capture, 454-457

of derived data systems, 492, 524

(see also changelogs)

avoiding coordination, 527

statement-based, 158

of different replication methods, 332-335

trigger-based replication, 161

using quorums, 334

write-ahead log (WAL) shipping, 159

relying on, 330-332

linearizability of operations, 333

constraints and uniqueness, 330

locking and leader election, 330

cross-channel timing dependencies, 331

log sequence number, 156, 449

locking and leader election, 330

read-scaling architecture, 161

stronger than causal consistency, 342

relation to consensus, 367

using to implement total order broadcast,

setting up new followers, 155

351

synchronous versus asynchronous, 153-155

versus serializability, 329

leaderless replication, 177-191

LinkedIn

(see also replication)

Azkaban (workflow scheduler), 402

detecting concurrent writes, 184-191

Databus (change data capture), 161, 455

capturing happens-before relationship,

Espresso (database), 31, 126, 130, 153, 216

187

Helix (cluster manager) (see Helix)

happens-before relationship and concur‐

profile (example), 30

rency, 186

reference to company entity (example), 34

last write wins, 186

Rest.li (RPC framework), 135

merging concurrently written values,

Voldemort (database) (see Voldemort)

190

Linux, leap second bug, 8, 290

version vectors, 191

liveness properties, 308

multi-datacenter, 184

LMDB (storage engine), 82, 242

quorums, 179-182

load

consistency limitations, 181-183, 334

approaches to coping with, 17

sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183

describing, 11

read repair and anti-entropy, 178

load testing, 16

leap seconds, 8, 290

load balancing (messaging), 444

in time-of-day clocks, 288

local indexes (see document-partitioned

leases, 295

indexes)

implementation with ZooKeeper, 370

locality (data access), 32, 41, 555

574 | Index

in batch processing, 400, 405, 421

replication, 152, 158-161

in stateful clients, 170, 511

change data capture, 454-457

in stream processing, 474, 478, 508, 522

(see also changelogs)

location transparency, 134

coordination with snapshot, 156

in the actor model, 138

logical (row-based) replication, 160

locks, 556

statement-based replication, 158

deadlock, 258

trigger-based replication, 161

distributed locking, 301-304, 330

write-ahead log (WAL) shipping, 159

fencing tokens, 303

scalability limits, 493

implementation with ZooKeeper, 370

loose coupling, 396, 419, 502

relation to consensus, 374

lost updates (see updates)

for transaction isolation

LSM-trees (indexes), 78-79

in snapshot isolation, 239

comparison to B-trees, 83-85

in two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261

Lucene (storage engine), 79

making operations atomic, 243

building indexes in batch processes, 411

performance, 258

similarity search, 88

preventing dirty writes, 236

Luigi (workflow scheduler), 402

preventing phantoms with index-range

LWW (see last write wins)

locks, 260, 265

read locks (shared mode), 236, 258

M

shared mode and exclusive mode, 258

machine learning

in two-phase commit (2PC)

ethical considerations, 534

deadlock detection, 364

(see also ethics)

in-doubt transactions holding locks, 362

iterative processing, 424

materializing conflicts with, 251

models derived from training data, 505

preventing lost updates by explicit locking,

statistical and numerical algorithms, 428

244

MADlib (machine learning toolkit), 428

log sequence number, 156, 449

magic scaling sauce, 18

logic programming languages, 504

Mahout (machine learning toolkit), 428

logical clocks, 293, 343, 494

maintainability, 18-22, 489

for read-after-write consistency, 164

defined, 23

logical logs, 160

design principles for software systems, 19

logs (data structure), 71, 556

evolvability (see evolvability)

advantages of immutability, 460

operability, 19

compaction, 73, 79, 456, 460

simplicity and managing complexity, 20

for stream operator state, 479

many-to-many relationships

creating using total order broadcast, 349

in document model versus relational model,

implementing uniqueness constraints, 522

39

log-based messaging, 446-451

modeling as graphs, 49

comparison to traditional messaging,

many-to-one and many-to-many relationships,

448, 451

33-36

consumer offsets, 449

many-to-one relationships, 34

disk space usage, 450

MapReduce (batch processing), 390, 399-400

replaying old messages, 451, 496, 498

accessing external services within job, 404,

slow consumers, 450

412

using logs for message storage, 447

comparison to distributed databases

log-structured storage, 71-79

designing for frequent faults, 417

log-structured merge tree (see LSM-

diversity of processing models, 416

trees)

diversity of storage, 415

Index | 575

comparison to stream processing, 464

meeting room booking (example), 249, 259,

comparison to Unix, 413-414

521

disadvantages and limitations of, 419

membership services, 372

fault tolerance, 406, 414, 422

Memcached (caching server), 4, 89

higher-level tools, 403, 426

memory

implementation in Hadoop, 400-403

in-memory databases, 88

the shuffle, 402

durability, 227

implementation in MongoDB, 46-48

serial transaction execution, 253

machine learning, 428

in-memory representation of data, 112

map-side processing, 408-410

random bit-flips in, 529

broadcast hash joins, 409

use by indexes, 72, 77

merge joins, 410

memory barrier (CPU instruction), 338

partitioned hash joins, 409

MemSQL (database)

mapper and reducer functions, 399

in-memory storage, 89

materialization of intermediate state,

read committed isolation, 236

419-423

memtable (in LSM-trees), 78

output of batch workflows, 411-413

Mercurial (version control system), 463

building search indexes, 411

merge joins, MapReduce map-side, 410

key-value stores, 412

mergeable persistent data structures, 174

reduce-side processing, 403-408

merging sorted files, 76, 402, 405

analysis of user activity events (exam‐

Merkle trees, 532

ple), 404

Mesos (cluster manager), 418, 506

grouping records by same key, 406

message brokers (see messaging systems)

handling skew, 407

message-passing, 136-139

sort-merge joins, 405

advantages over direct RPC, 137

workflows, 402

distributed actor frameworks, 138

marshalling (see encoding)

evolvability, 138

massively parallel processing (MPP), 216

MessagePack (encoding format), 116

comparison to composing storage technolo‐

messages

gies, 502

exactly-once semantics, 360, 476

comparison to Hadoop, 414-418, 428

loss of, 442

master-master replication (see multi-leader

using total order broadcast, 348

replication)

messaging systems, 440-451

master-slave replication (see leader-based repli‐

(see also streams)

cation)

backpressure, buffering, or dropping mes‐

materialization, 556

sages, 441

aggregate values, 101

brokerless messaging, 442

conflicts, 251

event logs, 446-451

intermediate state (batch processing),

comparison to traditional messaging,

420-423

448, 451

materialized views, 101

consumer offsets, 449

as derived data, 386, 499-504

replaying old messages, 451, 496, 498

maintaining, using stream processing,

slow consumers, 450

467, 475

message brokers, 443-446

Maven (Java build tool), 428

acknowledgements and redelivery, 445

Maxwell (change data capture), 455

comparison to event logs, 448, 451

mean, 14

multiple consumers of same topic, 444

media monitoring, 467

reliability, 442

median, 14

uniqueness in log-based messaging, 522

576 | Index

Meteor (web framework), 456

replication topologies, 175-177

microbatching, 477, 495

use cases, 168

microservices, 132

clients with offline operation, 170

(see also services)

collaborative editing, 170

causal dependencies across services, 493

multi-datacenter replication, 168, 335

loose coupling, 502

multi-object transactions, 228

relation to batch/stream processors, 389,

need for, 231

508

Multi-Paxos (total order broadcast), 367

Microsoft

multi-table index cluster tables (Oracle), 41

Azure Service Bus (messaging), 444

multi-tenancy, 284

Azure Storage, 155, 398

multi-version concurrency control (MVCC),

Azure Stream Analytics, 466

239, 266

DCOM (Distributed Component Object

detecting stale MVCC reads, 263

Model), 134

indexes and snapshot isolation, 241

MSDTC (transaction coordinator), 356

mutual exclusion, 261

Orleans (see Orleans)

(see also locks)

SQL Server (see SQL Server)

MySQL (database)

migrating (rewriting) data, 40, 130, 461, 497

binlog coordinates, 156

modulus operator (%), 210

binlog parsing for change data capture, 455

MongoDB (database)

circular replication topology, 175

aggregation pipeline, 48

consistent snapshots, 156

atomic operations, 243

distributed transaction support, 361

BSON, 41

InnoDB storage engine (see InnoDB)

document data model, 31

JSON support, 30, 42

hash partitioning (sharding), 203-204

leader-based replication, 153

key-range partitioning, 202

performance of XA transactions, 360

lack of join support, 34, 42

row-based replication, 160

leader-based replication, 153

schema changes in, 40

MapReduce support, 46, 400

snapshot isolation support, 242

oplog parsing, 455, 456

(see also InnoDB)

partition splitting, 212

statement-based replication, 159

request routing, 216

Tungsten Replicator (multi-leader replica‐

secondary indexes, 207

tion), 170

Mongoriver (change data capture), 455

conflict detection, 177

monitoring, 10, 19

monotonic clocks, 288

N

monotonic reads, 164

nanomsg (messaging library), 442

MPP (see massively parallel processing)

Narayana (transaction coordinator), 356

MSMQ (messaging), 361

NATS (messaging), 137

multi-column indexes, 87

near-real-time (nearline) processing, 390

multi-leader replication, 168-177

(see also stream processing)

(see also replication)

Neo4j (database)

handling write conflicts, 171

Cypher query language, 52

conflict avoidance, 172

graph data model, 50

converging toward a consistent state,

Nephele (dataflow engine), 421

172

netcat (Unix tool), 397

custom conflict resolution logic, 173

Netflix Chaos Monkey, 7, 280

determining what is a conflict, 174

Network Attached Storage (NAS), 146, 398

linearizability, lack of, 333

network model, 36

Index | 577

graph databases versus, 60

stateful, offline-capable clients, 170, 511

imperative query APIs, 46

offline-first applications, 511

Network Time Protocol (see NTP)

offsets

networks

consumer offsets in partitioned logs, 449

congestion and queueing, 282

messages in partitioned logs, 447

datacenter network topologies, 276

OLAP (online analytic processing), 91, 556

faults (see faults)

data cubes, 102

linearizability and network delays, 338

OLTP (online transaction processing), 90, 556

network partitions, 279, 337

analytics queries versus, 411

timeouts and unbounded delays, 281

workload characteristics, 253

next-key locking, 260

one-to-many relationships, 30

nodes (in graphs) (see vertices)

JSON representation, 32

nodes (processes), 556

online systems, 389

handling outages in leader-based replica‐

(see also services)

tion, 156

Oozie (workflow scheduler), 402

system models for failure, 307

OpenAPI (service definition format), 133

noisy neighbors, 284

OpenStack

nonblocking atomic commit, 359

Nova (cloud infrastructure)

nondeterministic operations

use of ZooKeeper, 370

accidental nondeterminism, 423

Swift (object storage), 398

partial failures in distributed systems, 275

operability, 19

nonfunctional requirements, 22

operating systems versus databases, 499

nonrepeatable reads, 238

operation identifiers, 518, 522

(see also read skew)

operational transformation, 174

normalization (data representation), 33, 556

operators, 421

executing joins, 39, 42, 403

flow of data between, 424

foreign key references, 231

in stream processing, 464

in systems of record, 386

optimistic concurrency control, 261

versus denormalization, 462

Oracle (database)

NoSQL, 29, 499

distributed transaction support, 361

transactions and, 223

GoldenGate (change data capture), 161,

Notation3 (N3), 56

170, 455

npm (package manager), 428

lack of serializability, 226

NTP (Network Time Protocol), 287

leader-based replication, 153

accuracy, 289, 293

multi-table index cluster tables, 41

adjustments to monotonic clocks, 289

not preventing write skew, 248

multiple server addresses, 306

partitioned indexes, 209

numbers, in XML and JSON encodings, 114

PL/SQL language, 255

preventing lost updates, 245

O

read committed isolation, 236

object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks,

Real Application Clusters (RAC), 330

30

recursive query support, 54

error handling and aborted transactions,

snapshot isolation support, 239, 242

232

TimesTen (in-memory database), 89

unsafe read-modify-write cycle code, 244

WAL-based replication, 160

object-relational mismatch, 29

XML support, 30

observer pattern, 506

ordering, 339-352

offline systems, 390

by sequence numbers, 343-348

(see also batch processing)

causal ordering, 339-343

578 | Index

partial order, 341

ballot number, 368

limits of total ordering, 493

Multi-Paxos (total order broadcast), 367

total order broadcast, 348-352

percentiles, 14, 556

Orleans (actor framework), 139

calculating efficiently, 16

outliers (response time), 14

importance of high percentiles, 16

Oz (programming language), 504

use in service level agreements (SLAs), 15

Percona XtraBackup (MySQL tool), 156

P

performance

package managers, 428, 505

describing, 13

packet switching, 285

of distributed transactions, 360

packets

of in-memory databases, 89

corruption of, 306

of linearizability, 338

sending via UDP, 442

of multi-leader replication, 169

PageRank (algorithm), 49, 424

perpetual inconsistency, 525

paging (see virtual memory)

pessimistic concurrency control, 261

ParAccel (database), 93

phantoms (transaction isolation), 250

parallel databases (see massively parallel pro‐

materializing conflicts, 251

cessing)

preventing, in serializability, 259

parallel execution

physical clocks (see clocks)

of graph analysis algorithms, 426

pickle (Python), 113

queries in MPP databases, 216

Pig (dataflow language), 419, 427

Parquet (data format), 96, 131

replicated joins, 409

(see also column-oriented storage)

skewed joins, 407

use in Hadoop, 414

workflows, 403

partial failures, 275, 310

Pinball (workflow scheduler), 402

limping, 311

pipelined execution, 423

partial order, 341

in Unix, 394

partitioning, 199-218, 556

point in time, 287

and replication, 200

polyglot persistence, 29

in batch processing, 429

polystores, 501

multi-partition operations, 514

PostgreSQL (database)

enforcing constraints, 522

BDR (multi-leader replication), 170

secondary index maintenance, 495

causal ordering of writes, 177

of key-value data, 201-205

Bottled Water (change data capture), 455

by key range, 202

Bucardo (trigger-based replication), 161,

skew and hot spots, 205

173

rebalancing partitions, 209-214

distributed transaction support, 361

automatic or manual rebalancing, 213

foreign data wrappers, 501

problems with hash mod N, 210

full text search support, 490

using dynamic partitioning, 212

leader-based replication, 153

using fixed number of partitions, 210

log sequence number, 156

using N partitions per node, 212

MVCC implementation, 239, 241

replication and, 147

PL/pgSQL language, 255

request routing, 214-216

PostGIS geospatial indexes, 87

secondary indexes, 206-209

preventing lost updates, 245

document-based partitioning, 206

preventing write skew, 248, 261

term-based partitioning, 208

read committed isolation, 236

serial execution of transactions and, 255

recursive query support, 54

Paxos (consensus algorithm), 366

representing graphs, 51

Index | 579

serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261

pure functions, 48

snapshot isolation support, 239, 242

putting computation near data, 400

WAL-based replication, 160

XML and JSON support, 30, 42

Q

pre-splitting, 212

Qpid (messaging), 444

Precision Time Protocol (PTP), 290

quality of service (QoS), 285

predicate locks, 259

Quantcast File System (distributed filesystem),

predictive analytics, 533-536

398

amplifying bias, 534

query languages, 42-48

ethics of (see ethics)

aggregation pipeline, 48

feedback loops, 536

CSS and XSL, 44

preemption

Cypher, 52

of datacenter resources, 418

Datalog, 60

of threads, 298

Juttle, 504

Pregel processing model, 425

MapReduce querying, 46-48

primary keys, 85, 556

recursive SQL queries, 53

compound primary key (Cassandra), 204

relational algebra and SQL, 42

primary-secondary replication (see leader-

SPARQL, 59

based replication)

query optimizers, 37, 427

privacy, 536-543

queueing delays (networks), 282

consent and freedom of choice, 538

head-of-line blocking, 15

data as assets and power, 540

latency and response time, 14

deleting data, 463

queues (messaging), 137

ethical considerations (see ethics)

quorums, 179-182, 556

legislation and self-regulation, 542

for leaderless replication, 179

meaning of, 539

in consensus algorithms, 368

surveillance, 537

limitations of consistency, 181-183, 334

tracking behavioral data, 536

making decisions in distributed systems,

probabilistic algorithms, 16, 466

301

process pauses, 295-299

monitoring staleness, 182

processing time (of events), 469

multi-datacenter replication, 184

producers (message streams), 440

relying on durability, 309

programming languages

sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183

dataflow languages, 504

for stored procedures, 255

functional reactive programming (FRP),

R

504

R-trees (indexes), 87

logic programming, 504

RabbitMQ (messaging), 137, 444

Prolog (language), 61

leader-based replication, 153

(see also Datalog)

race conditions, 225

promises (asynchronous operations), 135

(see also concurrency)

property graphs, 50

avoiding with linearizability, 331

Cypher query language, 52

caused by dual writes, 452

Protocol Buffers (data format), 117-121

dirty writes, 235

field tags and schema evolution, 120

in counter increments, 235

provenance of data, 531

lost updates, 242-246

publish/subscribe model, 441

preventing with event logs, 462, 507

publishers (message streams), 440

preventing with serializable isolation, 252

punch card tabulating machines, 390

write skew, 246-251

Raft (consensus algorithm), 366

580 | Index

sensitivity to network problems, 369

events in stream processing, 440

term number, 368

recursive common table expressions (SQL), 54

use in etcd, 353

redelivery (messaging), 445

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent

Redis (database)

Disks), 7, 398

atomic operations, 243

railways, schema migration on, 496

durability, 89

RAMCloud (in-memory storage), 89

Lua scripting, 255

ranking algorithms, 424

single-threaded execution, 253

RDF (Resource Description Framework), 57

usage example, 4

querying with SPARQL, 59

redundancy

RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), 276

hardware components, 7

read committed isolation level, 234-237

of derived data, 386

implementing, 236

(see also derived data)

multi-version concurrency control

Reed–Solomon codes (error correction), 398

(MVCC), 239

refactoring, 22

no dirty reads, 234

(see also evolvability)

no dirty writes, 235

regions (partitioning), 199

read path (derived data), 509

register (data structure), 325

read repair (leaderless replication), 178

relational data model, 28-42

for linearizability, 335

comparison to document model, 38-42

read replicas (see leader-based replication)

graph queries in SQL, 53

read skew (transaction isolation), 238, 266

in-memory databases with, 89

as violation of causality, 340

many-to-one and many-to-many relation‐

read-after-write consistency, 163, 524

ships, 33

cross-device, 164

multi-object transactions, need for, 231

read-modify-write cycle, 243

NoSQL as alternative to, 29

read-scaling architecture, 161

object-relational mismatch, 29

reads as events, 513

relational algebra and SQL, 42

real-time

versus document model

collaborative editing, 170

convergence of models, 41

near-real-time processing, 390

data locality, 41

(see also stream processing)

relational databases

publish/subscribe dataflow, 513

eventual consistency, 162

response time guarantees, 298

history, 28

time-of-day clocks, 288

leader-based replication, 153

rebalancing partitions, 209-214, 556

logical logs, 160

(see also partitioning)

philosophy compared to Unix, 499, 501

automatic or manual rebalancing, 213

schema changes, 40, 111, 130

dynamic partitioning, 212

statement-based replication, 158

fixed number of partitions, 210

use of B-tree indexes, 80

fixed number of partitions per node, 212

relationships (see edges)

problems with hash mod N, 210

reliability, 6-10, 489

recency guarantee, 324

building a reliable system from unreliable

recommendation engines

components, 276

batch process outputs, 412

defined, 6, 22

batch workflows, 403, 420

hardware faults, 7

iterative processing, 424

human errors, 9

statistical and numerical algorithms, 428

importance of, 10

records, 399

of messaging systems, 442

Index | 581

software errors, 8

approaches to, 214

Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI), 134

parallel query execution, 216

remote procedure calls (RPCs), 134-136

resilient systems, 6

(see also services)

(see also fault tolerance)

based on futures, 135

response time

data encoding and evolution, 136

as performance metric for services, 13, 389

issues with, 134

guarantees on, 298

using Avro, 126, 135

latency versus, 14

using Thrift, 135

mean and percentiles, 14

versus message brokers, 137

user experience, 15

repeatable reads (transaction isolation), 242

responsibility and accountability, 535

replicas, 152

REST (Representational State Transfer), 133

replication, 151-193, 556

(see also services)

and durability, 227

RethinkDB (database)

chain replication, 155

document data model, 31

conflict resolution and, 246

dynamic partitioning, 212

consistency properties, 161-167

join support, 34, 42

consistent prefix reads, 165

key-range partitioning, 202

monotonic reads, 164

leader-based replication, 153

reading your own writes, 162

subscribing to changes, 456

in distributed filesystems, 398

Riak (database)

leaderless, 177-191

Bitcask storage engine, 72

detecting concurrent writes, 184-191

CRDTs, 174, 191

limitations of quorum consistency,

dotted version vectors, 191

181-183, 334

gossip protocol, 216

sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183

hash partitioning, 203-204, 211

monitoring staleness, 182

last-write-wins conflict resolution, 186

multi-leader, 168-177

leaderless replication, 177

across multiple datacenters, 168, 335

LevelDB storage engine, 78

handling write conflicts, 171-175

linearizability, lack of, 335

replication topologies, 175-177

multi-datacenter support, 184

partitioning and, 147, 200

preventing lost updates across replicas, 246

reasons for using, 145, 151

rebalancing, 213

single-leader, 152-161

search feature, 209

failover, 157

secondary indexes, 207

implementation of replication logs,

siblings (concurrently written values), 190

158-161

sloppy quorums, 184

relation to consensus, 367

ring buffers, 450

setting up new followers, 155

Ripple (cryptocurrency), 532

synchronous versus asynchronous,

rockets, 10, 36, 305

153-155

RocksDB (storage engine), 78

state machine replication, 349, 452

leveled compaction, 79

using erasure coding, 398

rollbacks (transactions), 222

with heterogeneous data systems, 453

rolling upgrades, 8, 112

replication logs (see logs)

routing (see request routing)

reprocessing data, 496, 498

row-oriented storage, 96

(see also evolvability)

row-based replication, 160

from log-based messaging, 451

rowhammer (memory corruption), 529

request routing, 214-216

RPCs (see remote procedure calls)

582 | Index

Rubygems (package manager), 428

schema evolution, 120

rules (Datalog), 61

traditional approach to design, fallacy in,

462

S

searches

safety and liveness properties, 308

building search indexes in batch processes,

in consensus algorithms, 366

411

in transactions, 222

k-nearest neighbors, 429

sagas (see compensating transactions)

on streams, 467

Samza (stream processor), 466, 467

partitioned secondary indexes, 206

fault tolerance, 479

secondaries (see leader-based replication)

streaming SQL support, 466

secondary indexes, 85, 557

sandboxes, 9

partitioning, 206-209, 217

SAP HANA (database), 93

document-partitioned, 206

scalability, 10-18, 489

index maintenance, 495

approaches for coping with load, 17

term-partitioned, 208

defined, 22

problems with dual writes, 452, 491

describing load, 11

updating, transaction isolation and, 231

describing performance, 13

secondary sorts, 405

partitioning and, 199

sed (Unix tool), 392

replication and, 161

self-describing files, 127

scaling up versus scaling out, 146

self-joins, 480

scaling out, 17, 146

self-validating systems, 530

(see also shared-nothing architecture)

semantic web, 57

scaling up, 17, 146

semi-synchronous replication, 154

scatter/gather approach, querying partitioned

sequence number ordering, 343-348

databases, 207

generators, 294, 344

SCD (slowly changing dimension), 476

insufficiency for enforcing constraints, 347

schema-on-read, 39

Lamport timestamps, 345

comparison to evolvable schema, 128

use of timestamps, 291, 295, 345

in distributed filesystems, 415

sequential consistency, 351

schema-on-write, 39

serializability, 225, 233, 251-266, 557

schemaless databases (see schema-on-read)

linearizability versus, 329

schemas, 557

pessimistic versus optimistic concurrency

Avro, 122-127

control, 261

reader determining writer’s schema, 125

serial execution, 252-256

schema evolution, 123

partitioning, 255

dynamically generated, 126

using stored procedures, 253, 349

evolution of, 496

serializable snapshot isolation (SSI),

affecting application code, 111

261-266

compatibility checking, 126

detecting stale MVCC reads, 263

in databases, 129-131

detecting writes that affect prior reads,

in message-passing, 138

264

in service calls, 136

distributed execution, 265, 364

flexibility in document model, 39

performance of SSI, 265

for analytics, 93-95

preventing write skew, 262-265

for JSON and XML, 115

two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261

merits of, 127

index-range locks, 260

schema migration on railways, 496

performance, 258

Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121

Serializable (Java), 113

Index | 583

serialization, 113

clock skew, 291-294, 334

(see also encoding)

in transaction isolation

service discovery, 135, 214, 372

read skew, 238, 266

using DNS, 216, 372

write skew, 246-251, 262-265

service level agreements (SLAs), 15

(see also write skew)

service-oriented architecture (SOA), 132

meanings of, 238

(see also services)

unbalanced workload, 201

services, 131-136

compensating for, 205

microservices, 132

due to celebrities, 205

causal dependencies across services, 493

for time-series data, 203

loose coupling, 502

in batch processing, 407

relation to batch/stream processors, 389,

slaves (see leader-based replication)

508

sliding windows (stream processing), 472

remote procedure calls (RPCs), 134-136

(see also windows)

issues with, 134

sloppy quorums, 183

similarity to databases, 132

(see also quorums)

web services, 132, 135

lack of linearizability, 334

session windows (stream processing), 472

slowly changing dimension (data warehouses),

(see also windows)

476

sessionization, 407

smearing (leap seconds adjustments), 290

sharding (see partitioning)

snapshots (databases)

shared mode (locks), 258

causal consistency, 340

shared-disk architecture, 146, 398

computing derived data, 500

shared-memory architecture, 146

in change data capture, 455

shared-nothing architecture, 17, 146-147, 557

serializable snapshot isolation (SSI),

(see also replication)

261-266, 329

distributed filesystems, 398

setting up a new replica, 156

(see also distributed filesystems)

snapshot isolation and repeatable read,

partitioning, 199

237-242

use of network, 277

implementing with MVCC, 239

sharks

indexes and MVCC, 241

biting undersea cables, 279

visibility rules, 240

counting (example), 46-48

synchronized clocks for global snapshots,

finding (example), 42

294

website about (example), 44

snowflake schemas, 95

shredding (in relational model), 38

SOAP, 133

siblings (concurrent values), 190, 246

(see also services)

(see also conflicts)

evolvability, 136

similarity search

software bugs, 8

edit distance, 88

maintaining integrity, 529

genome data, 63

solid state drives (SSDs)

k-nearest neighbors, 429

access patterns, 84

single-leader replication (see leader-based rep‐

detecting corruption, 519, 530

lication)

faults in, 227

single-threaded execution, 243, 252

sequential write throughput, 75

in batch processing, 406, 421, 426

Solr (search server)

in stream processing, 448, 463, 522

building indexes in batch processes, 411

size-tiered compaction, 79

document-partitioned indexes, 207

skew, 557

request routing, 216

584 | Index

usage example, 4

read committed isolation, 236

use of Lucene, 79

recursive query support, 54

sort (Unix tool), 392, 394, 395

serializable isolation, 257

sort-merge joins (MapReduce), 405

snapshot isolation support, 239

Sorted String Tables (see SSTables)

T-SQL language, 255

sorting

XML support, 30

sort order in column storage, 99

SQLstream (stream analytics), 466

source of truth (see systems of record)

SSDs (see solid state drives)

Spanner (database)

SSTables (storage format), 76-79

data locality, 41

advantages over hash indexes, 76

snapshot isolation using clocks, 295

concatenated index, 204

TrueTime API, 294

constructing and maintaining, 78

Spark (processing framework), 421-423

making LSM-Tree from, 78

bytecode generation, 428

staleness (old data), 162

dataflow APIs, 427

cross-channel timing dependencies, 331

fault tolerance, 422

in leaderless databases, 178

for data warehouses, 93

in multi-version concurrency control, 263

GraphX API (graph processing), 425

monitoring for, 182

machine learning, 428

of client state, 512

query optimizer, 427

versus linearizability, 324

Spark Streaming, 466

versus timeliness, 524

microbatching, 477

standbys (see leader-based replication)

stream processing on top of batch process‐

star replication topologies, 175

ing, 495

star schemas, 93-95

SPARQL (query language), 59

similarity to event sourcing, 458

spatial algorithms, 429

Star Wars analogy (event time versus process‐

split brain, 158, 557

ing time), 469

in consensus algorithms, 352, 367

state

preventing, 322, 333

derived from log of immutable events, 459

using fencing tokens to avoid, 302-304

deriving current state from the event log,

spreadsheets, dataflow programming capabili‐

458

ties, 504

interplay between state changes and appli‐

SQL (Structured Query Language), 21, 28, 43

cation code, 507

advantages and limitations of, 416

maintaining derived state, 495

distributed query execution, 48

maintenance by stream processor in stream-

graph queries in, 53

stream joins, 473

isolation levels standard, issues with, 242

observing derived state, 509-515

query execution on Hadoop, 416

rebuilding after stream processor failure,

résumé (example), 30

478

SQL injection vulnerability, 305

separation of application code and, 505

SQL on Hadoop, 93

state machine replication, 349, 452

statement-based replication, 158

statement-based replication, 158

stored procedures, 255

statically typed languages

SQL Server (database)

analogy to schema-on-write, 40

data warehousing support, 93

code generation and, 127

distributed transaction support, 361

statistical and numerical algorithms, 428

leader-based replication, 153

StatsD (metrics aggregator), 442

preventing lost updates, 245

stdin, stdout, 395, 396

preventing write skew, 248, 257

Stellar (cryptocurrency), 532

Index | 585

stock market feeds, 442

maintaining derived state, 495

STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The

maintenance of materialized views, 467

Head), 158

messaging systems (see messaging systems)

stop-the-world (see garbage collection)

reasoning about time, 468-472

storage

event time versus processing time, 469,

composing data storage technologies,

477, 498

499-504

knowing when window is ready, 470

diversity of, in MapReduce, 415

types of windows, 472

Storage Area Network (SAN), 146, 398

relation to databases (see streams)

storage engines, 69-104

relation to services, 508

column-oriented, 95-101

search on streams, 467

column compression, 97-99

single-threaded execution, 448, 463

defined, 96

stream analytics, 466

distinction between column families

stream joins, 472-476

and, 99

stream-stream join, 473

Parquet, 96, 131

stream-table join, 473

sort order in, 99-100

table-table join, 474

writing to, 101

time-dependence of, 475

comparing requirements for transaction

streams, 440-451

processing and analytics, 90-96

end-to-end, pushing events to clients, 512

in-memory storage, 88

messaging systems (see messaging systems)

durability, 227

processing (see stream processing)

row-oriented, 70-90

relation to databases, 451-464

B-trees, 79-83

(see also changelogs)

comparing B-trees and LSM-trees, 83-85

API support for change streams, 456

defined, 96

change data capture, 454-457

log-structured, 72-79

derivative of state by time, 460

stored procedures, 161, 253-255, 557

event sourcing, 457-459

and total order broadcast, 349

keeping systems in sync, 452-453

pros and cons of, 255

philosophy of immutable events,

similarity to stream processors, 505

459-464

Storm (stream processor), 466

topics, 440

distributed RPC, 468, 514

strict serializability, 329

Trident state handling, 478

strong consistency (see linearizability)

straggler events, 470, 498

strong one-copy serializability, 329

stream processing, 464-481, 557

subjects, predicates, and objects (in triple-

accessing external services within job, 474,

stores), 55

477, 478, 517

subscribers (message streams), 440

combining with batch processing

(see also consumers)

lambda architecture, 497

supercomputers, 275

unifying technologies, 498

surveillance, 537

comparison to batch processing, 464

(see also privacy)

complex event processing (CEP), 465

Swagger (service definition format), 133

fault tolerance, 476-479

swapping to disk (see virtual memory)

atomic commit, 477

synchronous networks, 285, 557

idempotence, 478

comparison to asynchronous networks, 284

microbatching and checkpointing, 477

formal model, 307

rebuilding state after a failure, 478

synchronous replication, 154, 557

for data integration, 494-498

chain replication, 155

586 | Index

conflict detection, 172

CompactProtocol, 119

system models, 300, 306-310

field tags and schema evolution, 120

assumptions in, 528

throughput, 13, 390

correctness of algorithms, 308

TIBCO, 137

mapping to the real world, 309

Enterprise Message Service, 444

safety and liveness, 308

StreamBase (stream analytics), 466

systems of record, 386, 557

time

change data capture, 454, 491

concurrency and, 187

treating event log as, 460

cross-channel timing dependencies, 331

systems thinking, 536

in distributed systems, 287-299

(see also clocks)

T

clock synchronization and accuracy, 289

t-digest (algorithm), 16

relying on synchronized clocks, 291-295

table-table joins, 474

process pauses, 295-299

Tableau (data visualization software), 416

reasoning about, in stream processors,

tail (Unix tool), 447

468-472

tail vertex (property graphs), 51

event time versus processing time, 469,

Tajo (query engine), 93

477, 498

Tandem NonStop SQL (database), 200

knowing when window is ready, 470

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), 277

timestamp of events, 471

comparison to circuit switching, 285

types of windows, 472

comparison to UDP, 283

system models for distributed systems, 307

connection failures, 280

time-dependence in stream joins, 475

flow control, 282, 441

time-of-day clocks, 288

packet checksums, 306, 519, 529

timeliness, 524

reliability and duplicate suppression, 517

coordination-avoiding data systems, 528

retransmission timeouts, 284

correctness of dataflow systems, 525

use for transaction sessions, 229

timeouts, 279, 557

telemetry (see monitoring)

dynamic configuration of, 284

Teradata (database), 93, 200

for failover, 158

term-partitioned indexes, 208, 217

length of, 281

termination (consensus), 365

timestamps, 343

Terrapin (database), 413

assigning to events in stream processing,

Tez (dataflow engine), 421-423

471

fault tolerance, 422

for read-after-write consistency, 163

support by higher-level tools, 427

for transaction ordering, 295

thrashing (out of memory), 297

insufficiency for enforcing constraints, 347

threads (concurrency)

key range partitioning by, 203

actor model, 138, 468

Lamport, 345

(see also message-passing)

logical, 494

atomic operations, 223

ordering events, 291, 345

background threads, 73, 85

Titan (database), 50

execution pauses, 286, 296-298

tombstones, 74, 191, 456

memory barriers, 338

topics (messaging), 137, 440

preemption, 298

total order, 341, 557

single (see single-threaded execution)

limits of, 493

three-phase commit, 359

sequence numbers or timestamps, 344

Thrift (data format), 117-121

total order broadcast, 348-352, 493, 522

BinaryProtocol, 118

consensus algorithms and, 366-368

Index | 587

implementation in ZooKeeper and etcd, 370

triple-stores, 55-59

implementing with linearizable storage, 351

SPARQL query language, 59

using, 349

tumbling windows (stream processing), 472

using to implement linearizable storage, 350

(see also windows)

tracking behavioral data, 536

in microbatching, 477

(see also privacy)

tuple spaces (programming model), 507

transaction coordinator (see coordinator)

Turtle (RDF data format), 56

transaction manager (see coordinator)

Twitter

transaction processing, 28, 90-95

constructing home timelines (example), 11,

comparison to analytics, 91

462, 474, 511

comparison to data warehousing, 93

DistributedLog (event log), 448

transactions, 221-267, 558

Finagle (RPC framework), 135

ACID properties of, 223

Snowflake (sequence number generator),

atomicity, 223

294

consistency, 224

Summingbird (processing library), 497

durability, 226

two-phase commit (2PC), 353, 355-359, 558

isolation, 225

confusion with two-phase locking, 356

compensating (see compensating transac‐

coordinator failure, 358

tions)

coordinator recovery, 363

concept of, 222

how it works, 357

distributed transactions, 352-364

issues in practice, 363

avoiding, 492, 502, 521-528

performance cost, 360

failure amplification, 364, 495

transactions holding locks, 362

in doubt/uncertain status, 358, 362

two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261, 329, 558

two-phase commit, 354-359

confusion with two-phase commit, 356

use of, 360-361

index-range locks, 260

XA transactions, 361-364

performance of, 258

OLTP versus analytics queries, 411

type checking, dynamic versus static, 40

purpose of, 222

serializability, 251-266

U

actual serial execution, 252-256

UDP (User Datagram Protocol)

pessimistic versus optimistic concur‐

comparison to TCP, 283

rency control, 261

multicast, 442

serializable snapshot isolation (SSI),

unbounded datasets, 439, 558

261-266

(see also streams)

two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261

unbounded delays, 558

single-object and multi-object, 228-232

in networks, 282

handling errors and aborts, 231

process pauses, 296

need for multi-object transactions, 231

unbundling databases, 499-515

single-object writes, 230

composing data storage technologies,

snapshot isolation (see snapshots)

499-504

weak isolation levels, 233-251

federation versus unbundling, 501

preventing lost updates, 242-246

need for high-level language, 503

read committed, 234-238

designing applications around dataflow,

transitive closure (graph algorithm), 424

504-509

trie (data structure), 88

observing derived state, 509-515

triggers (databases), 161, 441

materialized views and caching, 510

implementing change data capture, 455

multi-partition data processing, 514

implementing replication, 161

pushing state changes to clients, 512

588 | Index

uncertain (transaction status) (see in doubt)

handling writes, 101

uniform consensus, 365

replicas using different sort orders, 100

(see also consensus)

vertical scaling (see scaling up)

uniform interfaces, 395

vertices (in graphs), 49

union type (in Avro), 125

property graph model, 50

uniq (Unix tool), 392

Viewstamped Replication (consensus algo‐

uniqueness constraints

rithm), 366

asynchronously checked, 526

view number, 368

requiring consensus, 521

virtual machines, 146

requiring linearizability, 330

(see also cloud computing)

uniqueness in log-based messaging, 522

context switches, 297

Unix philosophy, 394-397

network performance, 282

command-line batch processing, 391-394

noisy neighbors, 284

Unix pipes versus dataflow engines, 423

reliability in cloud services, 8

comparison to Hadoop, 413-414

virtualized clocks in, 290

comparison to relational databases, 499, 501

virtual memory

comparison to stream processing, 464

process pauses due to page faults, 14, 297

composability and uniform interfaces, 395

versus memory management by databases,

loose coupling, 396

89

pipes, 394

VisiCalc (spreadsheets), 504

relation to Hadoop, 499

vnodes (partitioning), 199

UPDATE statement (SQL), 40

Voice over IP (VoIP), 283

updates

Voldemort (database)

preventing lost updates, 242-246

building read-only stores in batch processes,

atomic write operations, 243

413

automatically detecting lost updates, 245

hash partitioning, 203-204, 211

compare-and-set operations, 245

leaderless replication, 177

conflict resolution and replication, 246

multi-datacenter support, 184

using explicit locking, 244

rebalancing, 213

preventing write skew, 246-251

reliance on read repair, 179

sloppy quorums, 184

V

VoltDB (database)

validity (consensus), 365

cross-partition serializability, 256

vBuckets (partitioning), 199

deterministic stored procedures, 255

vector clocks, 191

in-memory storage, 89

(see also version vectors)

output streams, 456

vectorized processing, 99, 428

secondary indexes, 207

verification, 528-533

serial execution of transactions, 253

avoiding blind trust, 530

statement-based replication, 159, 479

culture of, 530

transactions in stream processing, 477

designing for auditability, 531

end-to-end integrity checks, 531

W

tools for auditable data systems, 532

WAL (write-ahead log), 82

version control systems, reliance on immutable

web services (see services)

data, 463

Web Services Description Language (WSDL),

version vectors, 177, 191

133

capturing causal dependencies, 343

webhooks, 443

versus vector clocks, 191

webMethods (messaging), 137

Vertica (database), 93

WebSocket (protocol), 512

Index | 589

windows (stream processing), 466, 468-472

X

infinite windows for changelogs, 467, 474

XA transactions, 355, 361-364

knowing when all events have arrived, 470

heuristic decisions, 363

stream joins within a window, 473

limitations of, 363

types of windows, 472

xargs (Unix tool), 392, 396

winners (conflict resolution), 173

XML

WITH RECURSIVE syntax (SQL), 54

binary variants, 115

workflows (MapReduce), 402

encoding RDF data, 57

outputs, 411-414

for application data, issues with, 114

key-value stores, 412

in relational databases, 30, 41

search indexes, 411

XSL/XPath, 45

with map-side joins, 410

working set, 393

Y

write amplification, 84

write path (derived data), 509

Yahoo!

write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251

Pistachio (database), 461

characterizing, 246-251, 262

Sherpa (database), 455

examples of, 247, 249

YARN (job scheduler), 416, 506

materializing conflicts, 251

preemption of jobs, 418

occurrence in practice, 529

use of ZooKeeper, 370

phantoms, 250

preventing

Z

in snapshot isolation, 262-265

Zab (consensus algorithm), 366

in two-phase locking, 259-261

use in ZooKeeper, 353

options for, 248

ZeroMQ (messaging library), 442

write-ahead log (WAL), 82, 159

ZooKeeper (coordination service), 370-373

writes (database)

generating fencing tokens, 303, 349, 370

atomic write operations, 243

linearizable operations, 333, 351

detecting writes affecting prior reads, 264

locks and leader election, 330

preventing dirty writes with read commit‐

service discovery, 372

ted, 235

use for partition assignment, 215, 371

WS-* framework, 133

use of Zab algorithm, 349, 353, 366

(see also services)

WS-AtomicTransaction (2PC), 355

590 | Index

About the Author

Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems at the University of Cam‐

bridge, UK. Previously he was a software engineer and entrepreneur at internet com‐

panies including LinkedIn and Rapportive, where he worked on large-scale data

infrastructure. In the process he learned a few things the hard way, and he hopes this

book will save you from repeating the same mistakes.

Martin is a regular conference speaker, blogger, and open source contributor. He

believes that profound technical ideas should be accessible to everyone, and that

deeper understanding will help us develop better software.

Colophon

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Document Outline

Copyright

Table of Contents

Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

Scope of This Book

Outline of This Book

References and Further Reading

O’Reilly Safari

How to Contact Us

Acknowledgments

Part I. Foundations of Data Systems

Chapter 1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications

Thinking About Data Systems

Reliability

Hardware Faults

Software Errors

Human Errors

How Important Is Reliability?

Scalability

Describing Load

Describing Performance

Approaches for Coping with Load

Maintainability

Operability: Making Life Easy for Operations

Simplicity: Managing Complexity

Evolvability: Making Change Easy

Summary

Chapter 2. Data Models and Query Languages

Relational Model Versus Document Model

The Birth of NoSQL

The Object-Relational Mismatch

Many-to-One and Many-to-Many Relationships

Are Document Databases Repeating History?

Relational Versus Document Databases Today

Query Languages for Data

Declarative Queries on the Web

MapReduce Querying

Graph-Like Data Models

Property Graphs

The Cypher Query Language

Graph Queries in SQL

Triple-Stores and SPARQL

The Foundation: Datalog

Summary

Chapter 3. Storage and Retrieval

Data Structures That Power Your Database

Hash Indexes

SSTables and LSM-Trees

B-Trees

Comparing B-Trees and LSM-Trees

Other Indexing Structures

Transaction Processing or Analytics?

Data Warehousing

Stars and Snowflakes: Schemas for Analytics

Column-Oriented Storage

Column Compression

Sort Order in Column Storage

Writing to Column-Oriented Storage

Aggregation: Data Cubes and Materialized Views

Summary

Chapter 4. Encoding and Evolution

Formats for Encoding Data

Language-Specific Formats

JSON, XML, and Binary Variants

Thrift and Protocol Buffers

Avro

The Merits of Schemas

Modes of Dataflow

Dataflow Through Databases

Dataflow Through Services: REST and RPC

Message-Passing Dataflow

Summary

Part II. Distributed Data

Chapter 5. Replication

Leaders and Followers

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Replication

Setting Up New Followers

Handling Node Outages

Implementation of Replication Logs

Problems with Replication Lag

Reading Your Own Writes

Monotonic Reads

Consistent Prefix Reads

Solutions for Replication Lag

Multi-Leader Replication

Use Cases for Multi-Leader Replication

Handling Write Conflicts

Multi-Leader Replication Topologies

Leaderless Replication

Writing to the Database When a Node Is Down

Limitations of Quorum Consistency

Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff

Detecting Concurrent Writes

Summary

Chapter 6. Partitioning

Partitioning and Replication

Partitioning of Key-Value Data

Partitioning by Key Range

Partitioning by Hash of Key

Skewed Workloads and Relieving Hot Spots

Partitioning and Secondary Indexes

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Document

Partitioning Secondary Indexes by Term

Rebalancing Partitions

Strategies for Rebalancing

Operations: Automatic or Manual Rebalancing

Request Routing

Parallel Query Execution

Summary

Chapter 7. Transactions

The Slippery Concept of a Transaction

The Meaning of ACID

Single-Object and Multi-Object Operations

Weak Isolation Levels

Read Committed

Snapshot Isolation and Repeatable Read

Preventing Lost Updates

Write Skew and Phantoms

Serializability

Actual Serial Execution

Two-Phase Locking (2PL)

Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI)

Summary

Chapter 8. The Trouble with Distributed Systems

Faults and Partial Failures

Cloud Computing and Supercomputing

Unreliable Networks

Network Faults in Practice

Detecting Faults

Timeouts and Unbounded Delays

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks

Unreliable Clocks

Monotonic Versus Time-of-Day Clocks

Clock Synchronization and Accuracy

Relying on Synchronized Clocks

Process Pauses

Knowledge, Truth, and Lies

The Truth Is Defined by the Majority

Byzantine Faults

System Model and Reality

Summary

Chapter 9. Consistency and Consensus

Consistency Guarantees

Linearizability

What Makes a System Linearizable?

Relying on Linearizability

Implementing Linearizable Systems

The Cost of Linearizability

Ordering Guarantees

Ordering and Causality

Sequence Number Ordering

Total Order Broadcast

Distributed Transactions and Consensus

Atomic Commit and Two-Phase Commit (2PC)

Distributed Transactions in Practice

Fault-Tolerant Consensus

Membership and Coordination Services

Summary

Part III. Derived Data

Chapter 10. Batch Processing

Batch Processing with Unix Tools

Simple Log Analysis

The Unix Philosophy

MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems

MapReduce Job Execution

Reduce-Side Joins and Grouping

Map-Side Joins

The Output of Batch Workflows

Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases

Beyond MapReduce

Materialization of Intermediate State

Graphs and Iterative Processing

High-Level APIs and Languages

Summary

Chapter 11. Stream Processing

Transmitting Event Streams

Messaging Systems

Partitioned Logs

Databases and Streams

Keeping Systems in Sync

Change Data Capture

Event Sourcing

State, Streams, and Immutability

Processing Streams

Uses of Stream Processing

Reasoning About Time

Stream Joins

Fault Tolerance

Summary

Chapter 12. The Future of Data Systems

Data Integration

Combining Specialized Tools by Deriving Data

Batch and Stream Processing

Unbundling Databases

Composing Data Storage Technologies

Designing Applications Around Dataflow

Observing Derived State

Aiming for Correctness

The End-to-End Argument for Databases

Enforcing Constraints

Timeliness and Integrity

Trust, but Verify

Doing the Right Thing

Predictive Analytics

Privacy and Tracking

Summary

Glossary

Index

About the Author

Colophon