Revisiting Structured Storage: A Transactional Record Store

An increasing number of applications, such as electronic mail servers, web servers, and personal information managers, handle large amounts of homogeneous data. This data can be effectively represented as records and manipulated through simple operations, e.g., record reading, writing, and searching. Unfortunately, modern storage systems are inappropriate for the needs of these applications. On one side, file systems store only unstructured data (byte strings) with very limited reliability guarantees. On the other side, relational databases store structured data and provide both concurrency control and transactions; but relational databases are often too slow, complex, and difficult to manage for many applications. This paper presents a transactional record store that directly addresses the needs of modern applications. The store combines the simplicity and manageability of the file system interface with a select few features for managing record-oriented data. We describe the principles guiding the design of our transactional record store as well as its design. We also present a prototype implementation and its performance evaluation.