A model of the Calvin distributed database. The main purpose of this model is expository, rather than analysis for correctness or performance. All concurrency and distribution is modeled in a single-threaded process with in-memory data tables, which makes it easier to understand what is happening.

Spinoza, like Calvin, was a philosopher who dealt in determinism.

Calvin is developed by the Yale Databases group; the open-source releases are at https://github.com/yaledb.

The model of the underlying computer and network system is in lib/spinoza/system.

The Calvin model, implemented on the system models, is in lib/spinoza/calvin. Other distributed transaction models could also be implemented on this layer.

The transaction class, in lib/spinoza/transaction.rb, is mostly abstracted from these layers. It is very simplistic, intended to illustrate Calvin's replication and consistency characteristics.

You will need ruby 2.0 or later, from http://ruby-lang.org, and the gems listed in the gemspec:

sequel
sqlite3
rbtree

You can also gem install spinoza, but it may not be up to date.

To run the unit tests:

rake test

Examples TBD.

One benefit of modeling concurrency in a single thread is being able to see what is going on at every node at every moment in time. In fact, Spinoza keeps a history of all "events". (Events are how we model the passage of time and the actions that occur at a point in time.) As noted in test/test-scheduler.rb, you can use this to make assertions about what occurred, when, and where:

pp @timeline.history.select {|time, event| event.action != :step_epoch}

(The :step_epoch events are frequent and not usually very interesting.) The hostory is stored in a red-black tree for easy access by time interval.

• The Calvin papers:

  • The Case for Determinism in Database Systems

  • Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design

  • Modularity and Scalability in Calvin

  • Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems

  • Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems

• A presentation on Calvin:

  • https://speakerdeck.com/paperswelove/pwlsf-number-4-equals-joel-vanderwerf-on-calvin

• The performance and error modeling should optionally be statistical, with variation using some distribution.

• Model IO latency and compute time, in addition to currently modeled network latency.

• Log#time_replicated should be a function of the reading node and depend on the link characteristics between that node and the writing node.

• Transactions, to be more realistic, should have dataflow dependencies among operations. (But only for non-key values, because Calvin splits dependent transactions.)

• Transactions also need conditionals, or, at least, conditional abort, which is needed to support the splitting mentioned above.

• For comparison, implement a 2-phase commit transaction processor on top of the Spinoza::System classes.

• Output spacetime diagrams using graphviz.

• See also 'TODO' in code.

Joel VanderWerf, vjoel@users.sourceforge.net, @JoelVanderWerf.

Copyright (c) 2014, Joel VanderWerf

License for this project is BSD. See the COPYING file for the standard BSD license.