Fine-Grained Replication and Scheduling with Freshness and Correctness Guarantees

Fuat Akal, Can Türker, Hans-Jörg Schek, Yuri Breitbart, Torsten Grabs, Lourens Veen

In Proceedings

2005/9

Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB)

Trondheim, Norway

Lazy replication protocols provide good scalability properties by decoupling transaction execution from the propagation of new values to replica sites while guaranteeing a correct and more efficient transaction processing and replica maintenance. However, they impose several restrictions that are often not valid in practical database settings, e.g., they require that each transaction executes at its initiation site and/or are restricted to full replication schemes. Also, the protocols cannot guarantee that the transactions will always see the freshest available replicas. This paper presents a new lazy replication protocol called PDBREP that is free of these restrictions while ensuring one-copyserializable executions. The protocol exploits the distinction between read-only and update transactions and works with arbitrary physical data organizations such as partitioning and striping as well as different replica granularities. It does not require that each read-only transaction executes entirely at its initiation site. Hence, each read-only site need not contain a fully replicated database. PDBREP moreover generalizes the notion of freshness to finer data granules than entire databases.