Colloquium Speaker
Daniel Abadi, Yale University
Thursday, March 12, 12:30pm
Computer Science 105

Deterministic Transaction Processing

The database system was one of the first highly concurrent systems ever designed, and has served as a blueprint for the design of many subsequent concurrent computing systems. The decision to allow the system to process concurrent transactions nondeterministically has led to countless headaches from bugs (and debugging), security, replication, and general code complexity. In this talk, we will discuss a fundamentally different design for concurrent execution of transactions in database systems that guarantees that the final state of the database is deterministically prescribed from the input to the system. We look at the consequences of the deterministic design, from throughput and latency, to replication and recovery. We will also discuss a radically different mechanism for processing transactions that is enabled by the deterministic execution framework: lazy transactional processing. Instead of immediately processing transactions as they enter the system, transactions are only partially processed, with the remainder of processing performed at an optimal time for the database system. We will discuss the cache locality, load balancing, and performance benefits of our lazy processing framework.

Daniel Abadi is a member of the computer science faculty at Yale University where he performs research on database system architecture and implementation, especially at the intersection with scalable and distributed systems.  He is known for the development of the storage and query execution engines of the C-Store (column-oriented database) prototype, which was commercialized by Vertica and eventually acquired by Hewlett-Packard. More recently, his HaodopDB research on fault tolerant scalable analytical database systems was commercialized by Hadapt and acquired last summer by Teradata. Abadi has been a recipient of a Churchill Scholarship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the VLDB Early Career Researcher Award, the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award, and a VLDB best paper award.