Section: New Results
Fault-Tolerant Partial Replication in Large-Scale Database Systems
Participants : Marc Shapiro [ correspondent ] , Lamia Benmouffok, Pierre Sutra.
In distributed systems, information is replicated. Data replication enables cooperative work, improves access latency to data shared through the network, and improves availability in the presence of failures. When the information is updated, maintaining consistency between replicas is a major challenge.
Previous studies of data replication considered different areas separately, often ignoring the requirements of other areas. For instance, OS researchers often assume updates are independent; CSCW researchers ignore conflicts; algorithms research mostly ignores semantics; peer-to-peer systems often ignore mutable data and hence consistency; none of the above have addressed partial replication.
We study optimistic replication for multi-user collaborative applications such as co-operative engineering (e.g., co-operative code development), collaborative authoring (e.g., a decentralized wikipedia), or entreprise information libraries. We propose a general-purpose approach, subsuming the previous work in different areas. It takes addresses respecting application semantics, high-level operations, dependence, atomicity and conflict, long session times, etc.
We investigated a decentralized approach to committing transactions in a replicated database, under partial replication. Previous protocols either reexecute transactions entirely and/or compute a total order of transactions. In contrast, ours applies update values, and generate a partial order between mutually conflicting transactions only. Transactions execute faster, and distributed databases commit in small committees. Both effects contribute to preserve scalability as the number of databases and transactions increase. Our algorithm ensures serializability, and is live and safe in spite of faults.
The work described above takes place in the context of several joint projects: Grid4All, Respire and Prose. It is published at CFSE 2009 [21] .
