Sonata: Multi-Database Transactions Made Fast and Serializable

Today, the wide adoption of distributed service-oriented applications has rendered multi-database transactions increasingly important. They protect cross-service workflows that access multiple database systems from concurrency anomalies and failures. This paper presents Sonata, a new multi-database transaction system that provides high performance, global serializability, and seamless integration with existing applications and database systems. Sonata builds on the theory of commitment ordering to ensure global serializability and uses two-phase commit for atomicity and durability. Instead of treating database systems as black box storage, Sonata reuses existing database systems' concurrency control yet refrains from exposing or modifying their internals. It performs additional non-blocking coordination only at prepare time via application-level shim layers, allowing applications to incorporate Sonata without changing their existing queries or database systems. Evaluation using TPC-C shows that Sonata incurs 7.1% coordination overhead on average and outperforms prior work by up to 1114.3%.