Border-Collie: A Wait-free, Read-optimal Algorithm for Database Logging on Multicore Hardware

Abstract

Actions changing the state of databases are all logged with proper ordering being imposed. Database engines obeying this golden rule of logging enforce total ordering on all events, and this poses challenges in addressing the scalability bottlenecks of database logging on multicore hardware. We reexamined the problem of database logging and realized that in any given log history, obtaining an upper bound on the size of a set that preserves the happen-before relation is the essence of the matter. Based on our understanding, we propose Border-Collie, a wait-free and read-optimal algorithm for database logging that finds such an upper bound even with some worker threads often being idle. We show that (1) Border-Collie always finds the largest set of logged events satisfying the condition in a finite number of steps (i.e., wait-free), (2) the number of logged events to be read is also minimal (i.e., read-optimal), and (3) both properties hold even with threads being in intermittent work. Experimental results demonstrated that Border-Collie proves our claims under various workloads; Border-Collie outperforms the state-of-the-art centralized logging techniques by up to ∼2× and exhibits almost the same throughput with much shorter commit latency than the state-of-the-art decentralized logging techniques. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.