A planet-scale, available, transactional database with strong semantics

  • Your cloud-scale application must be highly available?
  • You need to serve millions of customers around the world with low latency responses?
  • You are tired of fixing inconsistencies in your key-value store?

Why Antidote?

Traditional databases provide strong guarantees but are slow and unavailable under failures and network partition. Hence, they are not suitable for geo-replication. The alternatives are NoSQL-style databases which are fast and available even under network partition. They provide a low-level key-value interface and expose data inconsistencies due to asynchronous communication among the servers. It takes significant effort and expertise from programmers to deal with these inconsistencies and develop correct applications on top of these databases.

For example, consider that your application stores a counter which counts the number of ads displayed to a user. For scalability, the database replicates all data in different locations. What will be the value of the counter, when it is incremented at two locations at the same time? As an application programmer, you have to detect such concurrent updates and resolve conflicting modifications. Antidote provides features that aid programmers to write correct applications, while having the same performance and horizontal scalability as AP/NoSQL, from a single machine to geo-replicated deployments, with the added guarantees of Causal Highly-Available Transactions, and provable absence of data corruption due to concurrency.

Characteristics

CRDTs

High-level replicated data types that are designed to work correctly in the presence of concurrent updates and partial failures.

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Highly Available Transactions (HATs)

In some cases, the application needs to maintain some relation between updates to different objects. Antidote provides causal consistency across all replicas, snapshot reads and atomic multi-object updates.

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Geo-replication

Designed to run on multiple servers in locations distributed world-wide. It provides continuous functioning even when there are failures or network partition.

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Where academia meets industry

Antidote is an artifact of the SyncFree Project. It incorporates cutting-edge research results on distributed systems and modern data stores, meeting for your needs!

Antidote is the first to provide all of these features in one data store:

  • Transactional Causal+ Consistency
  • Replication across DCs
  • Horizontal scalability by partitioning of the key space
  • Operation-based CRDT support
  • Partial Replication

Hint: Some features are still experimental and are not available on the master branch.

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