Paper Info
Title
Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion
Abstract
ABSTRACTBlockchain 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3448016.3452789
International Conference on Management of Data
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Taxonomy, Benchmark, Blockchain, Transaction, Database
Conference
0730-8078
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pingcheng Ruan1132.24
Tien Tuan Anh Dinh221219.13
Dumitrel Loghin3527.39
Meihui Zhang461842.24
Gang Chen579375.07
Qian Lin69611.17
Beng Chin Ooi778731076.70