dqlite

This repository provides the dqlite Go package, which can be used to replicate a SQLite database across a cluster, using the Raft algorithm.

Design higlights

No external processes needed: dqlite is just a Go library, you link it it to your application exactly like you would with SQLite.
Replication needs a SQLite patch which is not yet included upstream.
The Go Raft package from Hashicorp is used internally for replicating the write-ahead log frames of SQLite across all nodes.

How does it compare to rqlite?

The main differences from rqlite are:

Full support for transactions
No need for statements to be deterministic (e.g. you can use time())
Frame-based replication instead of statement-based replication, this means in dqlite there's more data flowing between nodes, so expect lower performance. Should not really matter for most use cases.

Status

This is beta software for now, but we'll get to rc/release soon.

Demo

To see dqlite in action, make sure you have the following dependencies installed:

Go (tested on 1.8)
gcc
any dependency/header that SQLite needs to build from source
Python 3

Then run:

go get -d github.com/CanonicalLtd/dqlite
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/CanonicalLtd/dqlite
make dependencies
./run-demo

This should spawn three dqlite-based nodes, each of one running the code in the demo Go source.

Each node inserts data in a test table and then dies abruptly after a random timeout. Leftover transactions and failover to other nodes should be handled gracefully.

While the demo is running, to get more details about what's going on behind the scenes you can also open another terminal and run a command like:

watch ls -l /tmp/dqlite-demo-*/ /tmp/dqlite-demo-*/snapshots/

and see how the data directories of the three nodes evolve in terms SQLite databases (test.db), write-ahead log files (test.db-wal), raft logs store (raft.db), and raft snapshots.

Documentation

The documentation for this package can be found on Godoc.

FAQ

Q: How does dqlite behave during conflict situations? Does Raft select a winning WAL write and any others in flight are aborted?

A: There can't be a conflict situation. Raft's model is that only the leader can append new log entries, which translated to dqlite means that only the leader can write new WAL frames. So this means that any attempt to perform a write transaction on a non-leader node will fail with a sqlite3x.ErrNotLeader error (and in this case clients are supposed to retry against whoever is the new leader).

Q: When not enough nodes are available, are writes hung until consensus?

A: Yes, however there's a (configurable) timeout. This is a consequence of Raft sitting in the CP spectrum of the CAP theorem: in case of a network partition it chooses consistency and sacrifices availability.

hstart / dqlite