FaunaDB is a distributed datastore inspired by the Calvin protocolA. Thomson, T. Diamond, S.-C. Weng, K. Ren, P. Shao, and D. J. Abadi, “Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems,” Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2012. for its core architecture.

Calvin protocol

Calvin is based on the following central idea:

By replicating inputs instead of effects to the various nodes of the system, it’s possible to have a more deterministic system where all the non-failing nodes go through the same states.

This determinism of the Calvin protocol can obviate the need for agreement protocols, such as two-phase commit, when performing distributed transactions since the nodes involved in the transaction can rely on each other, proceeding in the same way.

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