Hihooi: Fusing Workload Scalability with Strong Consistency for Transactional Databases

Overview

With the advent of the Internet and Internet-connected devices, modern business applications can experience rapid increases as well as variability in transactional workloads. Database replication has been employed to scale performance and improve availability of relational databases but past approaches have suffered from various issues including limited scalability, performance versus consistency tradeoffs, and requirements for database or application modifications. This talk presents Hihooi, a replication-based middleware system that is able to achieve workload scalability, strong consistency guarantees, and elasticity for existing transactional databases at a low cost. A novel replication algorithm enables Hihooi to propagate database modifications asynchronously to all replicas at high speeds, while ensuring that all replicas are consistent. At the same time, a fine-grained routing algorithm is used to load balance incoming transactions to available replicas in a consistent way. Our thorough experimental evaluation with several well-established benchmarks shows how Hihooi is able to achieve almost linear workload scalability for transactional databases.

Biography: Michael Sirivianos is an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering and Informatics at the Cyprus University of Technology. He holds a PhD from Duke University since 2010. His current research interests lie in the fields of trust-aware design of distributed systems, device-centric authentication, federated identity management, discrimination based on personal data, cybersafety, suppression of false information in the social web, and transactional workload scalability. He has have published articles in the most influential conferences and journals of Networked Systems, including ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX NSDI, ACM IMC, USENIX ATC, AAAI ICWSM, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and ACM Transactions on the Web. He has extensive experience in EU-funded projects. Specifically, he is the technical manager of the ReCRED project (Horizon 2020 Innovation Action - 2014) and the coordinator of the ENCASE project (Horizon 2020 Marie Curie RISE - 2015). He is also the co-director of the Network Systems and Science Research Laboratory.