Abstract
The rise of blockchain technology has inspired changes in the architecture of modern applications in various domains (e.g., finances, transport, etc.). Moving from a centralized data storage paradigm to the distributed ledger technology without central data storage raises important challenges, mostly in terms of scalability, integrity, and privacy. Even though decentralization, each node within the blockchain network implements a storage mechanism to keep track of the blockchain states. In this paper, we perform a detailed study of selected blockchain platforms in order to discover which underlying database solutions they use to store blockchain states. Our results show that 13 out of 20 platforms use key-value stores (LevelDB or RocksDB), write-optimized storage solutions able to perform fast lookups due to their underlying indexing structure used. Moreover, there are also platforms, which make use of the benefits of relational and document-oriented databases.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Belotti, M., Božić, N., Pujolle, G., Secci, S.: A vademecum on blockchain technologies: when, which, and how. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials 21(4), 3796–3838 (2019)
Koens, T., Poll, E.: “What blockchain alternative do you need?” In: Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology, pp. 113–129, Springer, Cham (2018)
Wüst, K., Gervais, A.: Do you need a blockchain? In: 2018 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT), pp. 45–54, IEEE (2018)
Peck, M.E.: Blockchain world-do you need a blockchain? this chart will tell you if the technology can solve your problem. IEEE Spectrum 54(10), 38–60 (2017)
Wood, G., et al.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Project Yellow Paper 151(2014), 1–32 (2014)
Cachin, C., et al.: Architecture of the hyperledger blockchain fabric. In: Workshop on Distributed Cryptocurrencies and Consensus Ledgers, vol. 310, p. 4 (2016)
Hearn, M.: Corda: a distributed ledger. Corda Technical White Paper, vol. 2016 (2016)
Muzammal, M., Qu, Q., Nasrulin, B.: Renovating blockchain with distributed databases: an open source system. Fut. Generation Comput. Syst. 90, 105–117 (2019)
Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., Wang, H.: An overview of blockchain technology: architecture, consensus, and future trends.” In: 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData congress), pp. 557–564, IEEE (2017)
Dinh, T.T.A., Liu, R., Zhang, M., Chen, G., Ooi, B.C., Wang, J.: Untangling blockchain: a data processing view of blockchain systems. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 30(7), 1366–1385 (2018)
Tschorsch, F., Scheuermann, B.: Bitcoin and beyond: a technical survey on decentralized digital currencies. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials 18(3), 2084–2123 (2016)
Chen, J., Lv, Z., Song, H.: Design of personnel big data management system based on blockchain. Fut. Generation Comput. Syst. 101, 1122–1129 (2019)
Zhu, Y., Zhang, Z., Jin, C., Zhou, A., Yan, Y.: Sebdb: semantics empowered blockchain database. In: 2019 IEEE 35th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 1820–1831, IEEE (2019)
McConaghy, T., Marques, R., Müller, A., De Jonghe, D., McConaghy, T., McMullen, G., Henderson, R., Bellemare, S., Granzotto, A.: Bigchaindb: a scalable blockchain database. White paper, BigChainDB (2016)
Bernardini, M., Pennino, D., Pizzonia, M.: Blockchains meet distributed hash tables: decoupling validation from state storage arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.01935 (2019)
Wang, S., Dinh, T.T.A., Lin, Q., Xie, Z., Zhang, M., Cai, Q., Chen, G., Ooi, B.C., Ruan, P.: Forkbase: an efficient storage engine for blockchain and forkable applications. Proc. VLDB Endowment 11(10), 1137–1150 (2018)
Groombridge, D., Healey, C.: Blockchain trials show pragmatism emerging across industries. Accessed 22 Dec 2019
Dean, J., Ghemawat, S.: Leveldb github repository. https://github.com/google/leveldb/blob/master/doc/index.md. Accessed 14 June 2019
Siying, D.: Welcome to rocksdb. https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki. Accessed 21 Sept 2019
Riegger, C., Vinçon, T., Petrov, I.: Efficient data and indexing structure for blockchains in enterprise systems. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services, pp. 173–182 (2018)
Group, C.M.D.: “Leveldb.” https://dbdb.io/db/leveldb (2020)
Group, C.M.D.: “Rocksdb.” https://dbdb.io/db/rocksdb (2020)
Dix, P.: Benchmarking leveldb vs. rocksdb vs. hyperleveldb vs. lmdb performance for influxdb. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/benchmarking-leveldb-vs-rocksdb-vs-hyperleveldb-vs-lmdb-performance-for-influxdb/ 20 June 2014
Group, C.M.D.: “Lmdb.” https://dbdb.io/db/lmdb (2020)
Trubetskoy, G.: Blockchain in postgresql part 2. https://grisha.org/blog/2017/10/20/blockchain-in-postgresql-part-2/ 20 Oct 2017
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P2-0057), and also in parts by EC H2020 Project CONCORDIA GA 830927.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Podgorelec, B., Turkanović, M., Šestak, M. (2020). A Brief Review of Database Solutions Used within Blockchain Platforms. In: Prieto, J., Pinto, A., Das, A., Ferretti, S. (eds) Blockchain and Applications. BLOCKCHAIN 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52535-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52535-4_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52534-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52535-4
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)