Dagbase: A Decentralized Database Platform Using DAG-Based Consensus

Abstract

As the infrastructure to provide support for distributed database management systems, the distributed database platform is very important to unify the management of data distributed in intricate environments. However, a traditional distributed database platform with centralized entities faces diverse and serious threats when the central entity is compromised. Consensus mechanisms in distributed ledger technology (DLT) can enhance the capability of defending threats by decentralizing the platform, but the efficiency and cost of consensus mechanisms in classic blockchain techniques are notable issues. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized database platform, named Dagbase, with the support of an efficient and cost-effective consensus mechanism that uses the directed acyclic graph (DAG) as the structure. Dagbase decentralizes the management and distributes data to prevent threats in untrustworthy environments, which gains benefits from recent DLT. The performance of near-native data reading and high-efficiency data writing is ensured by a layered architecture and DAG-based consensus. Furthermore, we ensure flexibility by decoupling the consensus mechanism from the architecture. Dagbase is also easy-to-use and can be integrated with mainstream database products seamlessly on account of great interoperability. The implementation demonstrates our work and the security and performance analysis are enforced for evaluation.