Towards Multiverse Databases

Alana Marzoev, Lara Timbó Araújo, Malte Schwarzkopf, Samyukta Yagati, Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris, M. Frans Kaashoek, Sam Madden
2019 Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - HotOS '19  
A multiverse database transparently presents each application user with a flexible, dynamic, and independent view of shared data. This transformed view of the entire database contains only information allowed by a centralized and easily-auditable privacy policy. By enforcing the privacy policy once, in the database, multiverse databases reduce programmer burden and eliminate many frontend bugs that expose sensitive data. Multiverse databases' per-user transformations risk expensive queries if
more » ... plied dynamically on reads, or impractical storage requirements if the database proactively materializes policy-compliant views. We propose an efficient design based on a joint dataflow across "universes" that combines global, shared computation and cached state with individual, per-user processing and state. This design, which supports arbitrary SQL queries and complex policies, imposes no performance overhead on read queries. Our early prototype supports thousands of parallel universes on a single server.
doi:10.1145/3317550.3321425 dblp:conf/hotos/MarzoevASYKMKM19 fatcat:juer3mguybaklbhudkuou4o4aq