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Publications

Publications by Nuno Filipe Faria

2021

Totally-Ordered Prefix Parallel Snapshot Isolation

Authors
Faria, N; Pereira, J;

Publication
PaPoC@EuroSys 2021, 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, Online Event, United Kingdom, April 26, 2021

Abstract
Distributed data management systems have increasingly been using variants of Snapshot Isolation (SI) as their transactional isolation criteria as it combines strong ACID guarantees with non-blocking reads and scalability. However, most existing proposals are limited by the performance of update propagation and stability detection, in particular, when execution and storage are disaggregated. In this paper, we propose TOPSI, an approach providing a restricted form of Parallel Snapshot Isolation (PSI) that allows partially ordering recent transactions to avoid waiting for remote updates or using a stale snapshot. Moreover, it has the interesting property of making a prefix of history in all sites converge to a common total order. This allows versions to be represented by a single scalar timestamp for certification and storage in a shared store. We demonstrate the impact on throughput and abort rate with a proof-of-concept implementation and the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark. © 2021 ACM.

2021

Towards Generic Fine-Grained Transaction Isolation in Polystores

Authors
Faria, N; Pereira, J; Alonso, AN; Vilaça, R;

Publication
Heterogeneous Data Management, Polystores, and Analytics for Healthcare - VLDB Workshops, Poly 2021 and DMAH 2021, Virtual Event, August 20, 2021, Revised Selected Papers

Abstract
Transactional isolation is a challenge for polystores, as along with the limited capabilities of each datastore, we have to contend with their sheer diversity. However, transactional isolation is increasingly desirable as a variety of datastores are being sought after for roles that go beyond data lakes. Transactional guarantees are also relevant for reliability at scale. In this paper, we propose that transactional isolation in polystores can be achieved by leveraging the query engine, i.e., basing some of the responsibilities of a traditional transactional storage manager (TSM) on the query language itself. This has the key advantage of greatly simplifying design and implementation, as it doesn’t need to be re-invented for each datastore, and should increase performance, by taking advantage of dynamic query optimization where available. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal with a simple proof-of-concept and experiment. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2022

AIDA-DB: A Data Management Architecture for the Edge and Cloud Continuum

Authors
Faria, N; Costa, D; Pereira, J; Vilaça, R; Ferreira, L; Coelho, F;

Publication
19th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference, CCNC 2022, Las Vegas, NV, USA, January 8-11, 2022

Abstract
There is an increasing demand for stateful edge computing for both complex Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and application services in emerging 5G networks. Managing a mutable persistent state in the edge does however bring new architectural, performance, and dependability challenges. Not only it has to be integrated with existing cloud-based systems, but also cope with both operational and analytical workloads and be compatible with a variety of SQL and NoSQL database management systems. We address these challenges with AIDA-DB, a polyglot data management architecture for the edge and cloud continuum. It leverages recent development in distributed transaction processing for a reliable mutable state in operational workloads, with a flexible synchronization mechanism for efficient data collection in cloud-based analytical workloads. © 2022 IEEE.

2022

Adaptive Database Synchronization for an Online Analytical Cloud-to-Edge Continuum

Authors
Costa, D; Pereira, J; Vilaca, R; Faria, N;

Publication
37TH ANNUAL ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING

Abstract
Wide availability of edge computing platforms, as expected in emerging 5G networks, enables a computing continuum between centralized cloud services and the edge of the network, close to end-user devices. This is particularly appealing for online analytics as data collected by devices is made available for decisionmaking. However, cloud-based parallel-distributed data processing platforms are not able to directly access data on the edge. This can be circumvented, at the expense of freshness, with data synchronization that periodically uploads data to the cloud for processing. In this work, we propose an adaptive database synchronization system that makes distributed data in edge nodes available dynamically to the cloud by balancing between reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and the computational effort needed to do so at the edge. This adapts to the availability of CPU and network resources as well as to the application workload.

2023

MRVs: Enforcing Numeric Invariants in Parallel Updates to Hotspots with Randomized Splitting

Authors
Faria, N; Pereira, J;

Publication
Proc. ACM Manag. Data

Abstract
Performance of transactional systems is degraded by update hotspots as conflicts lead to waiting and wasted work. This is particularly challenging in emerging large-scale database systems, as latency increases the probability of conflicts, state-of-the-art lock-based mitigations are not available, and most alternatives provide only weak consistency and cannot enforce lower bound invariants. We address this challenge with Multi-Record Values (MRVs), a technique that can be layered on existing database systems and that uses randomization to split and access numeric values in multiple records such that the probability of conflict can be made arbitrarily small. The only coordination needed is the underlying transactional system, meaning it retains existing isolation guarantees. The proposal is tested on five different systems ranging from DBx1000 (scale-up) to MySQL GR and a cloud-native NewSQL system (scale-out). The experiments explore design and configuration trade-offs and, with the TPC-C and STAMP Vacation benchmarks, demonstrate improved throughput and reduced abort rates when compared to alternatives.

2023

TiQuE: Improving the Transactional Performance of Analytical Systems for True HybridWorkloads

Authors
Faria, N; Pereira, J; Alonso, AN; Vilaca, R; Koning, Y; Nes, N;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE VLDB ENDOWMENT

Abstract
Transactions have been a key issue in database management for a long time and there are a plethora of architectures and algorithms to support and implement them. The current state-of-the-art is focused on storage management and is tightly coupled with its design, leading, for instance, to the need for completely new engines to support new features such as Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP). We address this challenge with a proposal to implement transactional logic in a query language such as SQL. This means that our approach can be layered on existing analytical systems but that the retrieval of a transactional snapshot and the validation of update transactions runs in the server and can take advantage of advanced query execution capabilities of an optimizing query engine. We demonstrate our proposal, TiQuE, on MonetDB and obtain an average 500x improvement in transactional throughput while retaining good performance on analytical queries, making it competitive with the state-of-the-art HTAP systems.