Enabling SQL-query processing for ethereum-based blockchain systems

Abstract

© 2019 ACM.A blockchain is designed to make consistent and reliable agreement in an unreliable and decentralized environment. It also permits processing transactions, making smart contracts, which allows end users to perform the contracts without any intermediate entities. However, there are some challenges in retrieving the state in a smart contract on the blockchain. For example, an external database or user-defined data structures can be used to retrieve the data from a smart contract in a range, which can increase the management overhead and decrease the overall performance of the blockchain system. In this paper, we propose a scheme that enables SQL query operations in a blockchain system. In our proposed scheme, the register and query managers provide fast retrieval of range data without any user-defined data structure, and management at low cost without any external database, respectively. We have implemented our scheme on quorum which is an Ethereum-based blockchain system and evaluated it using a synthetic benchmark. The experimental results show that our system can improve the search performance up to about 22x compared with the existing system with low memory usage.