lab1.md

LAB 1 The Storage And Log Layer.

The Design

In this chapter, we'll discuss the design of our distributed transactional database system. The overview of the architecture is:

As we know, a transaction system must ensure that properties of ACID will be held in most situations. How to ensure them?

Ensure Durability first

In the distributed environment, to meet the availability and reliability requirements, the key point is to improve them for the transaction logs. Like what AWS Aurora has said "log is the database", if the logs are persisted reliably, then the Durability will be held.

In a single machine database like MySQL, it's achieved by persisting InnoDB redo logs to the disk before return results to the client, obviously the logs could be lost if the single node fails. To persist the logs more reliably, replicas are needed so the distributed system is introduced. The difficult thing is how to make sure the logs are exactly the same in different replicas. Often we will use some consensus algorithms to replicate logs to different nodes, the CAP theory tells us the availability will increase and the possibility of losing logs becomes lower if more replicas are used.

In the architecture of tinykv, Raft is used as the consensus algorithm to replicate logs to replica nodes, and the code module is called raftStore.

raftStore will be responsible to replicate transaction logs or commit logs to different nodes, after the majority of the replicating members accept the logs successfully, they are considered committed and it's ok to respond to the client the write process could continue. This is the guarantee that once the transaction is committed, then all its write content is persisted to the disk at least on the majority nodes, so the Durability of transaction ACID is held in distributed environments.

With only the commit logs, read and write requests could not be served. The storage engine is used to apply or replay these logs and then it will serve these requests. In TiKV, rocksdb is used to build the storage engine layer. In tinykv, a similar storage engine badger is used, all the read and write requests will be processed by it. The difficult thing for the storage engine is to make itself as fast as possible while reducing the resources it needs.

How to make it Atomic

In the traditional solution of distributed transaction architectures, a special protocol such as two-phase commit is used to make sure the transaction processing is atomic. The problem is how to ensure that the transactional progress could continue correctly after failover, as in the traditional 2PC processing the whole process will get stuck if the coordinator is not available.

In tinykv the raftStore has ensured logs will be replicated to replicas, and the failover is much easier that transaction states could always be restored if majority nodes of the raft group survive. That is to say the 2PC processing could continue as the newly elected leaders will always have same transaction states, no matter the coordinator or the participant fails.

In tinysql/tinykv, the percolator protocol is used as the distributed transaction protocol, it's like the traditional 2PC way but still have some differences. One of the main differences is that the coordinator or the scheduler does not need to persist the transaction states locally, all the transaction states are persisted in the participant nodes. In tinysql/tinykv cluster, the tinysql nodes work as the transaction coordinators and all the tinykv nodes are participants.In the next labs, we'll go to implement the percolator protocol based on the existing framework of tinysql and tinykv.

Concurrency And Isolation

To get better performance, a transaction engine will need to process many concurrent requests, how to process them concurrently and ensure the results are reasonable? Isolation levels are defined to describe the tradeoff between performance and concurrency constraints, if you are not familiar with the transaction isolation levels and related concepts, the document could be referred.

In tinysql/tinykv cluster, we're going to implement a strong isolation constraint which is called snapshot isolation or repeatable read. In the distributed environment, a global timestamp ordering allocator is used to sequence all the concurrent transactions, and each transaction will have a unique start_ts which means the snapshot it uses, this timestamp ordering allocator is in tinyscheudler server in the tinysql/tinykv cluster. To learn more about the scheduler service of the cluster, this document could be helpful.

Support SQL Transaction

To build a complete distributed transaction database, we are going to add SQL support for the transaction grammars like BEGIN, COMMIT, ROLLBACK. The generally used write statements like INSERT, DELETE will be implemented to write data using distributed transactions into the storage layer. The SELECT results will also keep the transaction properties described in the above sections. And the transaction layer is able to handle read-write and write-write conflicts correctly.

LAB1

In this lab, we are going to get familiar with the whole framework in tinykv, and complete the implementation of the raftStore and storeEngine. As described above, the raftStore will process all the commit logs and replicate them to different nodes within different raft groups. In tinykv, a raft group is named Region, every region has its key ranges it will serve. There will be one region after the bootstrap stage, and the region could be split into more regions in the future, then different raft groups or what we call regions in the raftStore will be responsible for different key ranges, and multi-raft or multiple-regions will process client requests independently. By now you could simply regard that there is only one raft group or one region processing requests. This document could be helpful to understand the raftStore architecture.

The Code

The raftStore abstraction

In kv/storage/storage.go, there is the interface or abstractions of the raftStore.

// Storage represents the internal-facing server part of TinyKV, it handles sending and receiving from other
// TinyKV nodes. As part of that responsibility, it also reads and writes data to disk (or semi-permanent memory).
type Storage interface {
	Start(client scheduler_client.Client) error
	Stop() error
	Write(ctx *kvrpcpb.Context, batch []Modify) error
	Reader(ctx *kvrpcpb.Context) (StorageReader, error)
	Client() scheduler_client.Client
}

The Write interface will be used by the transaction engine to persist the write logs, if it returns ok then the logs have been successfully persisted and applied by the storage engine. Here two steps are needed, the first is to persist the logs on the majority nodes and the second is to apply these writes in the storage engine.

To make it simple, we will skip the raft log consensus step and just consider a single machine storage engine first. After this we will get familiar with the storage engine interfaces, that's very useful as the raftStore will use the same storage engine to persist logs too.

Implement The Core Interfaces of StandAloneStorage

Try to implement the missing code in kv/storage/standalone_storage/standalone_storage.go, these code parts are marked with:

// YOUR CODE HERE (lab1).

After finishing these parts, run make lab1P0 command to check if all the test cases are passed. Things to note:

• As the badger is used as the storage engine, the common usages could be found in its documents and repository.
• The badger storage engine does not support column family. The column families are needed for the percolator transaction model, in tinykv the column family related utilities are already wrapped in kv/util/engine_util/util.go. When process the storage.Modify, the key written into the storage engine should be encoded using KeyWithCF function considering its expected column family. In tinykv there are two types of Modify, check the kv/storage/modify.go for more information.
• The scheduler_client.Client will not be used by thestandAloneServer, so it could be skipped.
• The txn features and related read/write interfaces provided by badger could be considered. Check about the BadgerReader for more information.
• Some test cases could be useful to understand the usages of the storage interface.

Implement The Core Interfaces of RaftStorage

In the StandAloneStorage the log engine layer is ignored, and all the read and write requests are directly processed by the storage engine. In this chapter we'll try to build the log engine as described above. In standalone_storage a single badger instance is used as the storage engine. There will be two badger instances in raftStore, the first one is used as the storage engine or state machine just like the standalone_storage, the second one will be used by the log engine in raftStore to persist raft logs. In kv/util/engine_util/engines.go you could find Kv and Raft struct members, the Kv instance is used as the storage engine and the Raft is used by the raft log engine.

The workflow of the raftStore is:

There are some important concepts and abstracts, some of which are already referred to above, the lists are:

• RawNode. A wrap of the raft instance, the Step, Ready and Advance interfaces are used by the upper layer to drive the raft process. The RawNode and its inner raft instance are not responsible for actually sending messages and persisting logs, they will be set in the result Ready struct and the upper layer will process the ready result doing the real work.
• Ready. The ready is the output of the raft instance, they are expected to be processed by the upper layer, for example sending messages to other nodes and persist information to the log engine. More information about Ready could be found in the comments in kv/raft/rawnode.go.

The above concepts or abstractions are about the raft instance. The following concepts are built above the raft instance or RawNode.

• Region. A region is a raft group and is responsible for the read/write requests processing related to specific key ranges.
• Peer. A peer is a member of a raft group or a region, by default 3 replicas are used and a region will have 3 different peers. A peer will have a RawNode inside which contains a raft instance.
• raftWorker. The worker to process all the client requests routed to different region leaders or region peers.
• peerMsgHandler. The delegate used to process the client requests for a specific leader peer.
• applyWorker. After the proposed requests and the related logs are committed, correspond apply requests will be routed to the applyWorker, then these logs will be applied to the state machine which is the badger storage engine in tinykv.

Putting them together, the message flows could be split into two phases:

• The log consensus phase. The client requests are sent to the router with callbacks, raftWorker will handle the requests using correspond peer message handler.
• The log apply phase. After the logs are committed by the raft group, apply requests will be sent to the apply router, applyWorker will handle the apply requests and finally invoke the callbacks and then it's allowed to respond results to the client.

Documents which could be helpful to understand the raftStore:

• raftStore code analysis
• tikv source code reading raft propose
• tikv source code reading raft commit/apply

Try to implement the missing code in:

• kv/raftstore/peer_msg_handler.go, the proposeRaftCommand method, which is the core part of read/write requests proposing.
• kv/raftstore/peer.go, the HandleRaftReady method, which is the core part of raft ready processing.
• kv/raftstore/peer_storage.go, the SaveReadyState method, which is core part of the states and logs persistency.
• kv/raftstore/peer_storage.go, the Append method, it appends the logs from raft ready to the log engine.

These code part entrances are marked with:

// YOUR CODE HERE (lab1).

The to be finished code parts are marked with

// Hintx: xxxxx

There are some useful comments and guidance around them.

As the raftStore is quite complex so the tests are split into 4 parts, there is more information in the Makefile file, the order of the tests are:

• make lab1P1a. This is about the basic tests of raftStore logic.
• make lab1P1b with fault injections. This is about the basic tests of raftStore logic.
• make lab1P2a. This is about the persistency tests of raftStore.
• make lab1P2b with fault injections. This is about the persistency tests of raftStore.
• make lab1P3a. This is about the snapshot related tests of raftStore.
• make lab1P3b with fault injections. This is about the snapshot related tests of raftStore.
• make lab1P4a. This is about the configuration change tests of raftStore.
• make lab1P4b with fault injections. This is about the configuration change tests of raftStore.

Things to note:

• When the tests failed, there will be some trash directory or files in /tmp/test-raftstore-xxx, they could be removed by hand, or the make clean command could be used to do the cleanup work.
• The tests may consume much memory, better to use a development machine with RAM(>= 16 GB), if the tests could not run together because of OOM, try to run them one by one using commands like go test -v ./kv/test_raftstore -run test_name.
• Try to set bigger open file limits before running the tests, for example ulimit -n 8192.
• The raft package provides the raft implementation. It's wrapped into RawNode and the Step and Ready are the core interfaces to use the RawNode.
• There will be different kinds of workers in the RaftStorage, the most important worker is the raftWorker and applyWorker.
• Try to understand the whole message processing a new input client request and response to the client with results. As there are different workers and the raft consensus needs several steps, a client request will be possibly forwarded to different workers, also callbacks will be used to notify the caller with results.