Blockchain Enabled Distributed Data Management - A Vision

Abstract

Blockchain has gained much attention in recent academic and research works not only in crypto-currency but also in many other fields such as supply chain, health, storage etc. The application of blockchain in data management domain, however, is mostly geared towards the aspect of security and immutability. In this paper we propose integrating blockchain with distributed data management and study some open challenges and assumptions in doing so. We claim that, from data management perspective, blockchain's ability to handle unequal participants is more important than security and immutability. Finally, we propose possible ideas to integrate blockchain into distributed data transaction and management workflows to design a globally consistent data store ensuring availability guarantees along with support for unifying heterogeneous data backends.