A pragmatic protocol for database replication in interconnected clusters

• Main Author: Pereira, José, 1973-
• Publication Date: 2006
• Other Authors: Oliveira, Rui Carlos Mendes de, Grov, J., Soares, L., Correia Júnior, Alfrânio Tavares, Pedone, F.
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/6566
• topic: Distributed systems; Science & Technology

Multi-master update everywhere database replication, as achieved by protocols based on group communication such as DBSM and Postgres-R, addresses both performance and availability. By scaling it to wide area networks, one could save costly bandwidth and avoid large round-trips to a distant master server. Also, by ensuring that updates are safely stored at a remote site within transaction boundaries, disaster recovery is guaranteed. Unfortunately, scaling existing cluster based replication protocols is troublesome. In this paper we present a database replication protocol based on group communication that targets interconnected clusters. In contrast with previous proposals, it uses a separate multicast group for each cluster and thus does not impose any additional requirements on group communication, easing implementation and deployment in a real setting. Nonetheless, the protocol ensures one-copy equivalence while allowing all sites to execute update transactions. Experimental evaluation using the workload of the industry standard TPC-C benchmark confirms the advantages of the approach.