ChainifyDB: How to Blockchainify any Data Management System

Abstract

Today's permissioned blockchain systems come in a stand-alone fashion and require the users to integrate yet another full-fledged transaction processing system into their already complex data management landscape. This seems odd as blockchains and traditional DBMSs share large parts of their processing stack. Thus, rather than replacing the established data systems altogether, we advocate to simply 'chainify' them with a blockchain layer on top.Unfortunately, this task is far more challenging than it sounds: As we want to build upon heterogenous transaction processing systems, which potentially behave differently, we cannot rely on every organization to execute every transaction deterministically in the same way. Further, as these systems are already filled with data and being used by top-level applications, we also cannot rely on every organization being resilient against tampering with its local data.Therefore, in this work, we will drop these assumptions and introduce a powerful processing model that avoids them in the first place: The so-called Whatever-LedgerConsensus (WLC) model allows us to create a highly flexible permissioned blockchain layer coined ChainifyDB that (a) is centered around bullet-proof database technology, (b) makes even stronger guarantees than existing permissioned systems, (c) provides a sophisticated recovery mechanism, (d) has an up to 6x higher throughput than the permissioned blockchain system Fabric, and (e) can easily be integrated into an existing heterogeneous database landscape.

Privacy-Preserving, Scalable Blockchain-Based Solution for Monitoring Industrial Infrastructure in the Near Real-Time

“…They usually differ in the type of database and consensus protocol; for example, BigchainDB and ProvenDB use MongoDB, LedgerDB is a database on its own, and Chaini-fyDB [45] offers an overlay layer that can be deployed on any data management system (turning any database into blockchain).…”

A Data Integrity Verification Scheme for Centralized Database Using Smart Contract and Game Theory

“…Konsta et al [24] presented Clouseau, a blockchain-based system that provides verifiable integrity over a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with minimal overhead. New database systems, such as Veritas [25], Spitz [26], and ChainifyDB [27], incorporate blockchain technology to further improve storage security based on efficient query performance.…”

Efficient and lightweight indexing approach for multi-dimensional historical data in blockchain

“…Recent research has attempted to integrate database design with blockchain and vice versa. As a result, blockchain is becoming an increasingly important topic in database research [12,18,2,3]. Therefore, on the one hand, some studies considered to start with a database and add blockchain features on top of it.…”

“…In particular, they made extensive modifications to PostgreSQL to integrate the blockchain features in order to support relational database functions. Likewise, studies in [18,8] proposed approaches that mount the blockchain features on top of databases. In such a system, each peer in the blockchain has its own local database, running transactions through a consensus protocol to update the database, and the ledger acts as a secure, shared log storing transactions.…”

“…Next, Algorithm 3 proceeds to check the computed partition number into the root head node Root and goes to the specific B-plus tree to search the sequence number that is equal to v position and insert prefix values of the version v into that place (see lines 10-13 in Algorithm 3). Furthermore, if v's position number is equal to the last serial number of B-plus tree then Algorithm 3 automatically generate the next B-plus tree by coping the predefined tree as the current B-plus becomes full of size with v (see lines [18][19][20]. As a result, PPBPT needs less rebuilding cost to make the B-plus tree with its state versions.…”