An evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of deterministic database systems

Recent proposals for deterministic database system designs argue that deterministic database systems facilitate replication since the same input can be independently sent to two different replicas without concern for replica divergence. In addition, they argue that determinism yields performance benefits due to (1) the introduction of deadlock avoidance techniques, (2) the reduction (or elimination) of distributed commit protocols, and (3) light-weight locking. However, these performance benefits are not universally applicable, and there exist several disadvantages of determinism, including (1) the additional overhead of processing transactions for which it is not known in advance what data will be accessed, (2) an inability to abort transactions arbitrarily (e.g., in the case of database or partition overload), and (3) the increased latency required by a preprocessing layer that ensures that the same input is sent to every replica. This paper presents a thorough experimental study that carefully investigates both the advantages and disadvantages of determinism, in order to give a database user a more complete understanding of which database to use for a given database workload and cluster configuration.