Consistent and Efficient Batch Operations for NoSQL Databases with Hybrid Timestamp

Abstract

NoSQL databases, such as HBase or Cassandra employ weak consistency models to provide good scalability and availability. However, they often lack functionality that would help programmers reason about the correctness of their applications. Notably, they do not support consistent batch operations that could be used for important tasks, such as batch updates or maintaining secondary indexes. Some systems add transaction support to NoSQL databases. However, they often bring much overhead to existing single-row operations. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm for supporting batch operations on existing NoSQL databases. It reuses the existing local timestamp and adds a global timestamp to ensure batch operations’ consistency. Our implementation based on HBase shows that compared to transactional systems, our algorithm improves the throughput of batch operations by up to 2$\times$. Meanwhile, the latency of single-row operations only increases by around 12%. In comparison, other transactional systems increase their latency by over 3$\times$.