Hyperledger Fabric – Difference between World State DB & Transaction Logs

distributed ledger world state database transaction logs

This article highlights key differences between World State Database (DB) and Transaction Logs which comprise the Hyperledger Fabric Distributed Ledger.

Hyperledger Fabric Distributed Ledger can be said to be a combination of World State Database (DB) and transaction logs. It requires invocation of chaincode (smart contracts) for interacting with distributed ledgers (world state DB and transaction logs). The transactions are stored in the block in the same sequence in which they occured and this is responsibility of ordering service to ensure the ordering sequence of transactions in the block.

World State Database	Transaction Logs
Stores the chain’s state information in form of key-value pairs	Stores chain of blocks consisting of transaction details in form of sequence of transactions
Stored in database such as LevelDB or CouchDB	Stored as files in peer file system (local or attached storage)
Analogy: Classical Database such as RDBMS or NoSQL	Analogy: Write Ahead Logging (WAL)
Can be regenerated/recreated from transaction logs	—

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Ajitesh Kumar

I have been recently working in the area of Data analytics including Data Science and Machine Learning / Deep Learning. I am also passionate about different technologies including programming languages such as Java/JEE, Javascript, Python, R, Julia, etc, and technologies such as Blockchain, mobile computing, cloud-native technologies, application security, cloud computing platforms, big data, etc. I would love to connect with you on Linkedin. Check out my latest book titled as First Principles Thinking: Building winning products using first principles thinking.