Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion
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 and provides a principled framework for analyzing the emerging trend of blockchain-database fusion. 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. To expose the impact of different design choices on the overall performance, we conduct an in-depth performance analysis of two blockchains, namely Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, and two distributed databases, namely TiDB, and etcd. Lastly, we propose a framework for back-of-the-envelope performance forecast of blockchain-database hybrids.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1910.01310,
title = {Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases: Dichotomy and Fusion},
author = {Pingcheng Ruan and Tien Tuan Anh Dinh and Dumitrel Loghin and Meihui Zhang and Gang Chen and Qian Lin and Beng Chin Ooi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01310},
year = {2021}
}