Replication and consistency in a distributed environment

Abstract

The issue of data replication is considered in the context of a restricted system model motivated by certain distributed data-warehousing applications. A new replica management protocol is defined for this model in which global serializability is ensured, while message overhead and deadlock frequency are less than in previously published work. The advantages of the protocol arise from its use of a lazy approach to update secondary copies of replicated data and the use of a new concept, virtual sites, to reduce the potential for conflict among global transactions.