research-article

OXenstored: an efficient hierarchical and transactional database using functional programming with reference cell comparisons

Authors:

Thomas Gazagnaire,

Vincent HanquezAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '09: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 203 - 214

https://doi.org/10.1145/1596550.1596581

Published: 31 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We describe in this paper our implementation of the Xenstored service which is part of the Xen architecture. Xenstored maintains a hierarchical and transactional database, used for storing and managing configuration values.

We demonstrate in this paper that mixing functional data-structures together with reference cell comparison, which is a limited form of pointer comparison, is: (i) safe; and (ii) efficient. This demonstration is based, first, on an axiomatization of operations on the tree-like structure we used to represent the Xenstored database. From this axiomatization, we then derive an efficient algorithm for coalescing concurrent transactions modifying that structure. Finally, we experimentally compare the performance of our implementation, that we called OXenstored, and the C implementation of the Xenstored service distributed with the Xen hypervisor sources: the results show that Oxenstored is much more efficient than its C counterpart.

As a direct result of this work, OXenstored will be included in future releases of Xenserver, the virtualization product distributed by Citrix Systems, where it will replace the current implementation of the Xenstored service.

Supplementary Material

JPG File (oxenstoredanecienthierarchicalandtransactionaldatabaseusing.jpg)

Download
12.05 KB

MP4 File (oxenstoredanecienthierarchicalandtransactionaldatabaseusing.mp4)

Download
81.27 MB

References

[1]

Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield. Xen and the Art of Virtualization. In SOSP '03: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, pages 164--177. ACM Press, 2003.

Digital Library

[2]

Philip A. Bernstein, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Nathan Goodman. Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Addison-Wesley, 1987.

Digital Library

[3]

Debmalya Biswas. Compensation in the World of Web Services Composition. In SWSWPC, pages 69--80. LNCS 3387, 2004.

Digital Library

[4]

Debmalya Biswas, Thomas Gazagnaire, and Blaise Genest. Small logs for transactional services: Distinction is much more accurate than (positive) discrimination. IEEE International Symposium on High-Assurance Systems Engineering, pages 97--106, 2008.

Digital Library

[5]

Paul Butterworth, Allen Otis, and Jacob Stein. The gemstone object database management system. Commun. ACM, 34 (10): 64--77, 1991.

Digital Library

[6]

Koen Claessen and David Sands. Observable Sharing for Functional Circuit Description. In In Asian Computing Science Conference, pages 62--73. Springer-Verlag, 1999.

Digital Library

[7]

Robert J. Creasy. The Origin of the VM/370 Time-Sharing System. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 25 (5): 483--490, 1981.

Digital Library

[8]

Robert Ennals. Efficient software transactional memory. Technical Report IRC-TR-05-051, Intel Research Cambridge Tech Report, 2005.

[9]

J. Nathan Foster, Michael B. Greenwald, Jonathan T. Moore, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Alan Schmitt. Combinators for bidirectional tree transformations: A linguistic approach to the view-update problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 29 (3): 17, 2007.

[10]

Edward Fredkin. Trie memory. Commun. ACM, 3 (9): 490--499, 1960.

Digital Library

[11]

Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter. Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1992.

Digital Library

[12]

Theo Harder and Andreas Reuter. Principles of transaction-oriented database recovery. ACM Comput. Surv., 15 (4): 287--317, 1983.

Digital Library

[13]

Tim Harris and Keir Fraser. Language Support for Lightweight Transactions. In OOPSLA, 2003.

Digital Library

[14]

Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, et al. The Objective Caml system. http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/, 1996.

[15]

Chris Okasaki. Purely Functional Data Structures. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Digital Library

[16]

Andrew Pitts and Ian Stark. Observable properties of higher order functions that dynamically create local names, or: What's new. In Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, Proc. 18th Int. Symp., pages 122--141. Springer-Verlag, 1993.

Digital Library

[17]

Torvald Riegel, Christof Fetzer, and Pascal Felber. Snapshot Isolation for Software Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the First ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Hardware Support for Transactional Computing, 2006.

[18]

Manuel Serrano. Bee: an integrated development environment for the Scheme programming language. Journal of Functional Programming, 10 (4): 353--395, 2000.

Digital Library

[19]

Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou. Software Transactional Memory. In Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 204--213, 1995.

Digital Library

[20]

Phil Trinder. A functional database. PhD thesis, 1989.

Digital Library

Cited By

Madhavapeddy ASivaramakrishnan KGordon GGazagnaire T(2018)An architecture for interspatial communicationIEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406931(716-723)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406931
Garg AMishra DKulkarni P(2017)CatalystACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305076052:7(44-59)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050760
Nitu VOlivier PTchana AChiba DBarbalace AHagimont DRavindran B(2017)Swift Birth and Quick DeathACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305075852:7(1-14)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050758
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

OXenstored: an efficient hierarchical and transactional database using functional programming with reference cell comparisons
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Database management system engines
      1. Database transaction processing
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Data types and structures
      2. Language types
        Functional languages

Recommendations

OXenstored: an efficient hierarchical and transactional database using functional programming with reference cell comparisons
ICFP '09

We describe in this paper our implementation of the Xenstored service which is part of the Xen architecture. Xenstored maintains a hierarchical and transactional database, used for storing and managing configuration values.

We demonstrate in this paper ...
Unbounded page-based transactional memory
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

Exploiting thread level parallelism is paramount in the multicore era. Transactions enable programmers to expose such parallelism by greatly simplifying the multi-threaded programming model. Virtualized transactions (unbounded in space and time) are ...
Unbounded page-based transactional memory
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

Exploiting thread level parallelism is paramount in the multicore era. Transactions enable programmers to expose such parallelism by greatly simplifying the multi-threaded programming model. Virtualized transactions (unbounded in space and time) are ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP '09: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

August 2009

364 pages

ISBN:9781605583327

DOI:10.1145/1596550

General Chair:
Graham Hutton
University of Nottingham
,
Program Chair:
Andrew Tolmach
Portland State University

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 9
ICFP '09
September 2009
343 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1631687
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 August 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICFP '09

Sponsor:

ICFP '09: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

August 31 - September 2, 2009

Edinburgh, Scotland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

Upcoming Conference

ICFP '25

Sponsor:
sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

26
Total Citations
View Citations
312
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Madhavapeddy ASivaramakrishnan KGordon GGazagnaire T(2018)An architecture for interspatial communicationIEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406931(716-723)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406931
Garg AMishra DKulkarni P(2017)CatalystACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305076052:7(44-59)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050760
Nitu VOlivier PTchana AChiba DBarbalace AHagimont DRavindran B(2017)Swift Birth and Quick DeathACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305075852:7(1-14)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050758
Zhang JDong ELi JGuan H(2017)MigVisorACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305075352:7(30-43)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050753
Wang ZWu CLi JLai YZhang XHsu WCheng Y(2017)ReRanzACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140607.305075252:7(143-156)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140607.3050752
Nitu VOlivier PTchana AChiba DBarbalace AHagimont DRavindran B(2017)Swift Birth and Quick DeathProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/3050748.3050758(1-14)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3050748.3050758
Kaloper-Meršinjak DMehnert HMadhavapeddy ASewell P(2015)Not-quite-so-broken TLSProceedings of the 24th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/2831143.2831158(223-238)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2831143.2831158
Bernstein PDas SDing BPilman MSellis TDavidson SIves Z(2015)Optimizing Optimistic Concurrency Control for Tree-Structured, Log-Structured DatabasesProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/2723372.2737788(1295-1309)Online publication date: 27-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2737788
(2013)SIGMM award for outstanding PhD thesis in multimedia computing, communications and applications 2013ACM SIGMultimedia Records10.1145/2552972.25529875:3(9-10)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2552972.2552987
(2013)Opencast MatterhornACM SIGMultimedia Records10.1145/2552972.25529845:3(6-9)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2552972.2552984
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents