Time Series Feature Design: The Consensus has dRafted a Decision

And once he explained what he meant, I really couldn’t hold my excitement. We now have a major feature for 4.0. But before I get excited about that (we’ll only be able to actually start working on that in a few months, anyway), let us talk about what the actual suggestion was.

Raft is a consensus algorithm. It allows a distributed set of computers to arrive into a mutually agreed upon set of sequential log records. Hm… I wonder where else we can find sequential log records, and yes, I am looking at you Voron.Journal.

The basic idea is that we can take the concept of log shipping, but instead of having a single master/slave relationship, we change things so we can put Raft in the middle. When committing a transaction, we’ll hold off committing the transaction until we have a Raft consensus that it should be committed. The advantage here is that we won’t be constrained any longer by the master/slave issue. If there is a server down, we can still process requests (maybe need to elect a new cluster leader, but that is about it).

That means that from an architectural standpoint, we’ll have the ability to process write requests for any quorum (N/2+1). That is a pretty standard requirement for distributed databases, so that is perfectly fine.

That is a pretty awesome thing to have, to be honest, and more importantly, this is happening at the low level storage layer. That means that we can apply this behavior not just to a single database solution, but to many database solutions.

I’m pretty excited about this.