How to design a transaction management system for a custom key-value store

Question

My application uses a custom key-value store as data persistence layer. This key-value store is developed in-house and has some APIs to work with, however, it does not provide anything around transaction management or locking (especially distributed locking).

Now, we as the user of this key-value store need to develop such a locking/transaction management system. Could someone help showing how such a distributed locking can be implemented? Is Apache Zookeeper is worth looking at?

We use Java 7.

Thanks, NN

Answer 1

Plenty of options out there, many of them will even tell you how to do it:

• Zookeeper which you mentioned, they even say how to do it in their cookbook. You can check the Zookeeper whitepaper they say a little bit about implementing distributed locks.
• Hazelcast which is a in memory distributed data grid has a distributed lock implementation
• Redis has one, too!

Anything that's distributed and in-memory could be a good candidate (and it actually works) is a good candidate. Personally at work we are using ZK (to be more precise Curator to make it even easier) and it works well. Some of the libraries we are using do it with Hazelcast and it doesn't seem to be any worse