{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,12]],"date-time":"2026-06-12T03:19:52Z","timestamp":1781234392059,"version":"3.54.1"},"reference-count":64,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"12","content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Proc. VLDB Endow."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2023,8]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>A classic design of cloud-native databases adopts an architecture that consists of one read\/write (RW) node and one or more read-only (RO) nodes. In such a design, the propagation of write-ahead logs (WALs) from the RW node to the RO node(s) is typically performed asynchronously. Consequently, system designers either have to accept a loose consistency guarantee, where a read from the RO node may return stale data, or tolerate significant performance degradation in terms of read latency, as it then needs to wait for the log to be propagated and applied. Most commercial cloud-native databases, such as Amazon Aurora, choose performance over strong consistency. As a result, it makes RO nodes useless for many applications requiring read-after-write consistency (a form of strong consistency), and the support for serverless databases (i.e., allowing the RO nodes to be scaled out automatically) is impossible as they require a single endpoint.<\/jats:p>\n          <jats:p>\n            This paper proposes\n            <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">PolarDB-SCC<\/jats:italic>\n            (PolarDB-Strongly Consistent Cluster), a cloud-native database architecture that guarantees strongly consistent reads with very low latency. The core idea is to eliminate unnecessary waits and reduce the necessary wait time on RO nodes while still supporting strong consistency. To achieve this, it tracks the RW node's modification timestamp at three progressively finer-grained levels. We further design a Linear Lamport timestamp to reduce the RO node's timestamp fetching operations and leverage the RDMA network for all the data transferring (\n            <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">e.g.<\/jats:italic>\n            , timestamp fetching and log shipment) to minimize network overhead and extra CPU usage. Our evaluation shows that PolarDB-SCC does not incur any noticeable overhead for ensuring strongly consistent reads compared with the eventually consistent (stale) read policy. To the best of our knowledge, PolarDB-SCC is the first \"read-write splitting\" cloud-native database that supports strongly consistent read with negligible overhead. Compared with a straightforward read-wait design, PolarDB-SCC improves throughput by up to 4.51\u00d7 and reduces median latency by up to 3.66\u00d7 in SysBench's read-write workload. PolarDB-SCC is already commercially available at Alibaba Cloud.\n          <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.14778\/3611540.3611562","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,9,15]],"date-time":"2023-09-15T11:32:37Z","timestamp":1694777557000},"page":"3754-3767","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":14,"title":["PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads"],"prefix":"10.14778","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Xinjun","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yingqiang","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Hao","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chuan","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Feifei","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wenchao","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3127479.3131612"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","volume-title":"15th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XV).","author":"Ajoux Phillipe","year":"2015","unstructured":"Phillipe Ajoux, Nathan Bronson, Sanjeev Kumar, Wyatt Lloyd, and Kaushik Veeraraghavan. 2015. 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