ByteHTAP: bytedance's HTAP system with high data freshness and strong data consistency

In recent years, at ByteDance, we see more and more business scenarios that require performing complex analysis over freshly imported data, together with transaction support and strong data consistency. In this paper, we describe our journey of building ByteHTAP, an HTAP system with high data freshness and strong data consistency. It adopts a separate-engine and shared-storage architecture. Its modular system design fully utilizes an existing ByteDance's OLTP system and an open source OLAP system. This choice saves us a lot of resources and development time and allows easy future extensions such as replacing the query processing engine with other alternatives. ByteHTAP can provide high data freshness with less than one second delay, which enables many new business opportunities for our customers. Customers can also configure different data freshness thresholds based on their business needs. ByteHTAP also provides strong data consistency through global timestamps across its OLTP and OLAP system, which greatly relieves application developers from handling complex data consistency issues by themselves. In addition, we introduce some important performance optimizations to ByteHTAP, such as pushing computations to the storage layer and using delete bitmaps to efficiently handle deletes. Lastly, we will share our lessons and best practices in developing and running ByteHTAP in production.