A New Approach to Developing and Implementing Eager
Database Replication Protocols
Bettina Kemme, Gustavo Alonso
Abstract:
Database replication is traditionally seen as a way to increase the
availability and performance of distributed databases. Although a
large number of protocols providing data consistency and
fault-tolerance have been proposed, few of these ideas have ever
been used in commercial products due to their complexity and
performance implications. Instead, current products allow
inconsistencies and often resort to centralized approaches which
eliminates some of the advantages of replication. As an alternative,
we propose a suite of replication protocols that addresses the main
problems related to database replication. On the one hand, our
protocols maintain data consistency and the same transactional
semantics found in centralized systems. On the other hand, they
provide flexibility and reasonable performance. To do so, our
protocols take advantage of the rich semantics of group
communication primitives and the relaxed isolation guarantees
provided by most databases. This allows us to eliminate the
possibility of deadlocks, reduce the message overhead and increase
performance. A detailed simulation study shows the feasibility of
the approach and the flexibility with which different types of
bottlenecks can be circumvented.
ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Volume 25, No. 3, September
2000, pp 333-379
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