High-Performance Transaction Processing in Sprint

Sprint is a middleware infrastructure for high performance and high availability data management. It extends the functionality of a standalone in-memory database (IMDB) server to a cluster of commodity shared-nothing servers. Applications accessing an IMDB are typically limited by the memory capacity of the machine running the IMDB. Sprint partitions and replicates the database into segments and stores them in several data servers. Applications are then limited by the aggregated memory of the machines in the cluster. Transaction synchronization and commitment rely on total-order multicast. Differently from previous approaches, Sprint does not require accurate failure detection to ensure strong consistency, allowing fast reaction to failures. Experiments conducted on a cluster with 32 data servers using TPC-C and a micro-benchmark showed that Sprint can provide very good performance and scalability.