Blockchains vs. Distributed Databases

Abstract

Blockchain has come a long way - a system that was initially proposed specifically for cryptocurrencies is now being adapted and adopted as a general-purpose transactional system. As blockchain evolves into another data management system, the natural question is how it compares against distributed database systems. Existing works on this comparison focus on high-level properties, such as security and throughput. They stop short of showing how the underlying design choices contribute to the overall differences. Our work fills this important gap. We perform a twin study of blockchains and distributed database systems as two types of transactional systems. We propose a taxonomy that illustrates the dichotomy across four dimensions, namely replication, concurrency, storage, and sharding. Within each dimension, we discuss how the design choices are driven by two goals: security for blockchains, and performance for distributed databases. We conduct an extensive and in-depth performance analysis of two blockchains, namely Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, and three distributed databases, namely CockroachDB, TiDB, and etcd. Our analysis exposes the impact of different design choices on the overall performance. Concisely, our work provides a principled framework for analyzing the emerging trend of blockchain-database fusion.