Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon DynamoDB

Authors: 

Joseph Idziorek, Alex Keyes, Colin Lazier, Somu Perianayagam, Prithvi Ramanathan, James Christopher Sorenson III, Doug Terry, and Akshat Vig, Amazon Web Services

Abstract: 

NoSQL cloud database services are popular for their simple key-value operations, high availability, high scalability, and predictable performance. These characteristics are generally considered to be at odds with support for transactions that permit atomic and serializable updates to partitioned data. This paper explains how transactions were added to Amazon DynamoDB using a timestamp ordering protocol while exploiting the semantics of a key-value store to achieve low latency for both transactional and non-transactional operations. The results of experiments against a production implementation demonstrate that distributed transactions with full ACID properties can be supported without compromising on performance, availability, or scale.

USENIX ATC '23 Open Access Sponsored by
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {288707,
author = {Joseph Idziorek and Alex Keyes and Colin Lazier and Somu Perianayagam and Prithvi Ramanathan and James Christopher Sorenson III and Doug Terry and Akshat Vig},
title = {Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon {DynamoDB}},
booktitle = {2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-35-9},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {705--717},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc23/presentation/idziorek},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}

Presentation Video