Practical cross-engine transactions in dual-engine database systems

With the growing DRAM capacity and core count in modern servers, database systems are becoming increasingly multi-engine to feature a heterogeneous set of engines. In particular, a memory-optimized engine and a conventional storage-centric engine may coexist to satisfy various application needs. However, handling cross-engine transactions that access more than one engine remains challenging in terms of correctness, performance and programmability. This thesis describes Skeena, an approach to cross-engine transactions with proper isolation guarantees and low overhead. Skeena adapts and integrates past concurrency control theory to provide a complete solution to supporting various isolation levels in dual-engine systems, and proposes a lightweight transaction tracking structure that captures the necessary information to guarantee correctness with low overhead. Evaluation on a 40-core server shows that Skeena only incurs minuscule overhead for cross-engine transactions, without penalizing single-engine transactions.