Accelerating Native Transaction Processing in LSM-Based Persistent Key-Value Stores

In recent years, key-value stores (KV stores) [1]-[3] begin to gain popularity as storage engines for large-scale data applications. KV stores are fundamentally different from traditional SQL databases and with the key-value data model, they have various advantages, such as ease of use, flexibility and higher performance. However, some essential features in SQL databases, most notably atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) transaction processing [4], are considered impractical and thus are generally not included in a KV store design. With the recent advancement, these features begin to be integrated into KV stores, giving birth to a brand new class of database management systems called NewSQL databases [5], [6]. The rationale behind NewSQL databases is that with ACID transaction support, KV stores can serve as storage engines for an upper-layer SQL query processor to handle SQL queries [7]-[9]. In this way, NewSQL databases can provide both the scalability of KV stores and the ACID guarantees required for online transaction processing (OLTP), thus providing high performance for different types of workloads in a large-scale data system.