Transactions, Messages and Events: Merging Group Communication and Database Systems

Bettina Kemme, Gustavo Alonso

Abstract:
In this paper, we report on the DRAGON (Database Replication on Group Communication) project and the results obtained so far at ETH Zürich. The goal of DRAGON is to improve database replication strategies by using group communication primitives. As a first step in this direction, we have developed a suite of protocols implementing database replication based on broadcast primitives. We are currently embedding these protocols into a database management system to show the feasibility of the approach. In this short paper, we briefly discuss these protocols and analyze how they can be included in a database system. Our contribution is to further clarify the effort involved in the process and to explicitly state some of the issues commonly not considered by existing work. These issues are analyzed in detail and solutions are provided taking as example our current development efforts.

Proc. of the Third ERSADS European Research Seminar on Advances in Distributed Systems, Madeira Island, Portugal, April 1999.

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