Unifying Timestamp with Transaction Ordering for MVCC with Decentralized Scalar Timestamp

This paper presents DST, a decentralized scalar timestamp scheme to scale distributed transactions using multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). DST is efficient in storage and network by being a scalar timestamp but requiring no centralized timestamp service for coordination, which may become a scalability bottleneck. The key observation is that concurrency control (CC) protocols like OCC and 2PL already imply a serializable order among concurrent read-write transactions through conflicting database tuples. To this end, DST piggybacks on CC protocols to maintain the timestamp ordering with low cost and no new scalability bottleneck for read-write transactions. DST further provides snapshot reads with bounded staleness by using a hybrid scalar timestamp (physical clock and logical counter).

To demonstrate the generality of DST, we provide a general guideline for the integration of DST and further show the effectiveness by using three representative transactional systems (i.e., DrTM+R, MySQL cluster, and ROCOCO) with different CC protocols. Experimental results show that DST can achieve more than 95% of optimal performance (using Read Committed) without compromising correctness. With DST, DrTM+R achieves up to 1.8X higher peak throughput for TPC-E and outperforms other timestamp schemes by 6.3X for TPC-C. DST also leads up to 1.9X and 2.1X speedup on TPC-C for MySQL cluster and ROCOCO, respectively.