DottedDB

A prototype of a Dynamo-style distributed key-value database, implementing Server Wide Clocks as the main causality mechanism across the system.

Advantages

• Smaller metadata per key for tracking causality:
  • The logical clock per key will be in most cases one pair (node ID, counter);
• Correct distributed deletes, without the need for GC "tombstone" metadata;
  • In most cases a delete immediately deletes all metadata from the node;
  • When metadata is still keep in disk to ensure that old values don't return, it is latter deleted automatically via node synchronization;
• Efficient node synchronization protocol, making the expensive merkle trees unnecessary:
  • no more false positives being transferred between nodes;
  • no need to recompute the hashes for every update;
  • no need to maintain and store one merkle tree for every node in the system;
• Scalable logical clocks in case of high rate of node churn (nodes retiring / leaving):
  • Causality per key is automatically reduced to only living nodes as they are updated;

Building

# Build normal release
> rake rel

# Build 4 node dev cluster
> rake dev

Benchmarks

TODO