ForkBase An Efficient Storage Engine for Blockchain and Forkable Applications
1 minute read ∼ Filed in : A paper noteIntroduction
There is a gap between modern applications’ requirements and what existing storage systems offer. (some properties cannot naturally fit into the storage system)
E.g., some applications have followed requirements
- Blockchain systems’ distributed ledger abstraction.
- A shared data platform ( Github ) requires explicit data versioning and fork semantics features.
- High-availability systems have implicit forks, which are resolved by upper-layer applications.
Without storage support, there will be problem
- Additional development costs at the application layer,
- Performance overhead: Blockchain platforms build their tamper-evident data structures on top of a key-value store, these ad-hoc implementations do not always scale well,
As a result, pushing that functionality into the storage layer is required. It can provide the following benefits.
- Reduce development efforts for applications requiring combinations of those features.
- Helps applications generalize better with additional features without extra effort.
- The storage layer can exploit optimizations that are hard to implement application layer.
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