A suite of database replication protocols based on group communication primitives

Abstract

This paper proposes a family of replication protocols based on group communication in order to address some of the concerns expressed by database designers regarding existing replication solutions. Due to these concerns, current database systems allow inconsistencies and often resort to centralized approaches, thereby reducing some of the key advantages provided by replication. The protocols presented in this paper take advantage of the semantics of group communication and use related isolation guarantees to eliminate the possibility of deadlocks, reduce the message overhead, and increase performance. A simulation study shows the feasibility of the approach and the flexibility with which different types of bottlenecks can be circumvented.