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Modern distributed data management systems face a new challenge: how can autonomous, mutually-distrusting parties cooperate safely and effectively? Addressing this challenge brings up questions familiar from classical distributed systems: how to combine multiple steps into a single atomic action, how to recover from failures, and how to synchronize concurrent access to data. Nevertheless, each of these issues requires rethinking when participants are autonomous and potentially adversarial. We propose the notion of a *cross-chain deal*, a new way to structure complex distributed computations that manage assets in an adversarial setting. Deals are inspired by classical atomic transactions, but are necessarily different, in important ways, to accommodate the decentralized and untrusting nature of the exchange. We describe novel safety and liveness properties, along with two alternative protocols for implementing cross-chain deals in a system of independent blockchain ledgers. One protocol, based on synchronous communication, is fully decentralized, while the other, based on semi-synchronous communication, requires a globally shared ledger., Comment: To appear in VLDB 2020

Optimistic concurrency control (OCC) can exploit the strengths of parallel hardware to provide excellent performance for uncontended transactions, and is popular in high-performance in-memory databases and transactional systems. But at high contention levels, OCC is susceptible to frequent aborts, leading to wasted work and degraded performance. Contention managers, mixed optimistic/pessimistic concurrency control algorithms, and novel optimistic-inspired concurrency control algorithms, such as TicToc, aim to address this problem, but these mechanisms introduce sometimes-high overheads of their own. We show that in real-world benchmarks, traditional OCC can outperform these alternative mechanisms by simply adding fine-grained version timestamps (using different timestamps for disjoint components of each record). With fine-grained timestamps, OCC gets 1.14x TicToc's throughput in TPC-C at 128 cores (previous work reported TicToc having 1.8x higher throughput than OCC at 80 hyperthreads). Our study shows that timestamp granularity has a greater impact than previously thought on the performance of transaction processing systems, and should not be overlooked in the push for faster concurrency control schemes.