Blockchain-Enabled Large-Scale Transaction Management (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management)

This book offers a thorough overview of permissioned blockchain systems, emphasizing how they can tackle key challenges in large-scale transaction management systems. Modern transaction systems operate in untrustworthy environments where numerous distrustful entities interact while maintaining data on untrusted infrastructure. By relying on Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols, permissioned blockchain systems have enabled a large class of distributed applications. The presentation focuses on four critical requirements: performance, scalability, confidentiality, and verifiability, which are crucial for effective blockchain operations. Throughout the book, various techniques are explored to address these requirements. The goal is to enhance understanding of the fundamental issues in transaction processing and present techniques that facilitate efficient large-scale transaction management system development in untrusted environments. The practicality of these techniques is highlighted through real-world applications.

Divyakant Agrawal is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the course of his career, he has published more than 400 research articles and has mentored approximately 50 Ph.D. students. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal on Distributed and Parallel Databases and has either served or is serving on several Editorial Boards, including for ACM Transactions on Databases, IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, ACM Books, and The VLDB Journal. He is currently serving as the Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the AAAS.

Amr El Abbadi is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals and has been Program Chair for multiple databases and distributed systems conferences. He has published over 400 articles on databases and distributed systems and has supervised more than 40 Ph.D.