Lock Violation for Fault-tolerant Distributed Database System

Modern distributed database systems scale horizontally by partitioning their data across a large number of nodes. Most such systems build their transactional layers on a replication layer, employing a consensus protocol to ensure data consistency to achieve fault tolerance. Synchronization among replicated state machines thus becomes a significant overhead of transaction processing. Without careful design, synchronization could amplify transactions’ lock duration and impair the system’s scalability. Speculative techniques, such as Controlled Lock Violation (CLV) and Early Lock Release (ELR), prove useful in shortening lock’s critical path and boosting transaction processing performance. To use these techniques to optimize geo-replicated distributed databases(GDDB) is an intuitive idea. This paper shows that a naive application of speculation is often unhelpful in a distributed environment. Instead, we introduce Distributed Lock Violation (DLV), a specialized speculative technique for geo-replicated distributed databases. DLV can achieve good performance without incurring severe side effects.