FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store

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The provided text is an excerpt from a research paper on FoundationDB, an open-source, distributed transactional key-value store. The paper details FoundationDB's design principles, architecture, and key features, including its unbundled architecture, strict serializability through a combination of optimistic concurrency control (OCC) and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), and its robust deterministic simulation framework for testing. The paper also explores FoundationDB's geo-replication and failover capabilities, highlighting how the system achieves high availability and fault tolerance without sacrificing performance. Finally, the authors discuss lessons learned from developing FoundationDB, including the benefits of its divide-and-conquer design, the importance of simulation testing for achieving high reliability, and the impact of its fast recovery mechanisms on system upgrades and availability.

https://www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-paper.pdf