Reading Group Special Session: Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDB

When: May 11th at 12:00 pm EST

Who: Karthik Ranganathan.

Karthik Ranganathan is a founder and CTO of YugabyteDB, a globally distributed, strongly consistent database. Prior to Yugabyte, Karthik was at Facebook, where he built the Cassandra database. In this talk, Karthik will discuss Yugabyte’s use of time synchronization and Raft protocol along with some optimizations that enable high-performance distributed transactions.

Abstract

ACID transactions are a fundamental building block when developing business-critical, user-facing applications. They simplify the complex task of ensuring data integrity while supporting highly concurrent operations. While they are taken for granted in monolithic SQL databases, most distributed DBs would forsake them completely.

Fortunately, this is no longer the case. The trend started with Google Spanner, which offered distributed transactions using GPS based atomic clocks – unheard of in the database world before. Now, distributed transactions – without requiring atomic clocks – are offered by distributed SQL databases. One such example of a fully open source database offering this is YugabyteDB. Using the example of YugabyteDB, this talk will explain how distributed ACID transactions can be achieved without atomic clocks – without compromising on performance.