The Dangers of Replication and a Solution

  • ,
  • Pat Helland ,
  • Patrick O'Neil ,
  • Dennis Shasha

Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

Publication

Update anywhere-anytime-anyway transactional replication has unstable behavior as the workload scales up: a ten-fold increase in nodes and traffic gives a thousand fold increase in deadlocks or reconciliations. Master copy replication (primary copy) schemes reduce this problem. A simple analytic model demonstrates these results. A new two-tier replication algorithm is proposed that allows mobile (disconnected) applications to propose tentative update transactions that are later applied to a master copy. Commutative update transactions avoid the instability of other replication schemes.