Since the introduction of Bitcoin-the first widespread application driven by blockchain-the interest of the public and private sectors in blockchain has skyrocketed. In recent years, blockchain-based fabrics have been used to address challenges in diverse fields such as trade, food production, property rights, identity-management, aid delivery, health care, and fraud prevention. This widespread interest follows from fundamental concepts on which blockchains are built that together embed the notion of trust, upon which blockchains are built. 1. Blockchains provide data transparancy. Data in a...

The last decade has brought groundbreaking developments in transaction processing. This resurgence of an otherwise mature research area has spurred from the diminishing cost per GB of DRAM that allows many transaction processing workloads to be entirely memory-resident. This shift demanded a pause to fundamentally rethink the architecture of database systems. The data storage lexicon has now expanded beyond spinning disks and RAID levels to include the cache hierarchy, memory consistency models, cache coherence and write invalidation costs, NUMA regions, and coherence domains. New memory...