Prototyping PHLOX, A High Performance Transaction Processing System on a Workstation Cluster with Shared Disks

Coupling multiple workstations for high performance transaction processing has become increasingly attractive for reasons of capacity, cost, and availability. PHLOX is a prototypical transaction processing system running on the workstation cluster with shared disks. PHLOX supports a message oriented file system for database sharing, global cache coherency and concurrency control, affinity-based transaction routing, and sophisticated database recovery protocol. This paper describes the current prototype of PHLOX and discusses of the major design decisions that went into its construction. The lessons learned from this prototype and its predecessors are also presented.