Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion

Pingcheng Ruan, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Dumitrel Loghin, Meihui Zhang, Gang Chen, Qian Lin, Beng Chin Ooi

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

49 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Blockchain has come a long way - a system that was initially proposed specifically for cryptocurrencies is now being adapted and adopted as a general-purpose transactional system. As blockchain evolves into another data management system, the natural question is how it compares against distributed database systems. Existing works on this comparison focus on high-level properties, such as security and throughput. They stop short of showing how the underlying design choices contribute to the overall differences. Our work fills this important gap. We perform a twin study of blockchains and distributed database systems as two types of transactional systems. We propose a taxonomy that illustrates the dichotomy across four dimensions, namely replication, concurrency, storage, and sharding. Within each dimension, we discuss how the design choices are driven by two goals: security for blockchains, and performance for distributed databases. We conduct an extensive and in-depth performance analysis of two blockchains, namely Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, and three distributed databases, namely CockroachDB, TiDB, and etcd. Our analysis exposes the impact of different design choices on the overall performance. Concisely, our work provides a principled framework for analyzing the emerging trend of blockchain-database fusion.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1504-1517
Number of pages14
JournalProceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event2021 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2021 - Virtual, Online, China
Duration: 20 Jun 202125 Jun 2021

Keywords

  • benchmark
  • blockchain
  • database
  • taxonomy
  • transaction

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Ruan, P., Dinh, T. T. A., Loghin, D., Zhang, M., Chen, G., Lin, Q., & Ooi, B. C. (2021). Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion. Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1504-1517. https://doi.org/10.1145/3448016.3452789