  Numerous applications such as financial transactions (e.g., stock trading)
are write-heavy in nature. The shift from reads to writes in web applications
has also been accelerating in recent years. Write-ahead-logging is a common
approach for providing recovery capability while improving performance in most
storage systems. However, the separation of log and application data incurs
write overheads observed in write-heavy environments and hence adversely
affects the write throughput and recovery time in the system. In this paper, we
introduce LogBase - a scalable log-structured database system that adopts
log-only storage for removing the write bottleneck and supporting fast system
recovery. LogBase is designed to be dynamically deployed on commodity clusters
to take advantage of elastic scaling property of cloud environments. LogBase
provides in-memory multiversion indexes for supporting efficient access to data
maintained in the log. LogBase also supports transactions that bundle read and
write operations spanning across multiple records. We implemented the proposed
system and compared it with HBase and a disk-based log-structured
record-oriented system modeled after RAMCloud. The experimental results show
that LogBase is able to provide sustained write throughput, efficient data
access out of the cache, and effective system recovery.
