Modularity and Scalability in Calvin

Calvin is a transaction scheduling and replication management layer for distributed storage systems. By first writing transaction requests to a durable, replicated log, and then using a concurrency control mechanism that emulates a deterministic serial execution of the log’s transaction requests, Calvin supports strongly consistent replication and fully ACID distributed transactions while incurring significantly lower inter-partition transaction coordination costs than traditional distributed database systems. Furthermore, Calvin’s declarative specification of target concurrency-control behavior allows system components to avoid interacting with actual transaction scheduling mechanisms—whereas in traditional DBMSs, the analogous components often have to explicitly observe concurrency control modules’ (highly nondeterministic) procedural behaviors in order to function correctly.