High performance eventually consistent distributed database Zatara

With the proliferation of the computer cloud, new software delivery methods have been created. In order to build software to fit into one of these models, a scalable, easy to deploy storage tier is required. Distributed, non-SQL databases use multiple techniques to distribute information, guarantee data consistency and growth. Unfortunately, most developments were designed with a single class of applications in mind, which means that they bring many constraints for developers. Our approach involves a plug-in-able distributed database engine that abstracts interfaces with clients and data structures stored. The prototype, called Zatara, is tested on an Amazon EC2 infrastructure with 196 nodes. In this environment it is able to deliver more than 20 million transactions per second, scaling almost linearly with the number of nodes. From the performance point of view, these results demonstrate our initial assumptions that it is not necessary to expose a particular data structure in order for the database to scale. From the software developers' point of view, this approach simplifies migrations from SQL databases.