Beyond 1-safety and 2-safety for replicated databases: Group-safety

Abstract

In this paper, we study the safety guarantees of group communicationbased database replication techniques. We show that there is a model mismatch between group communication and database, and because of this, classical group communication systems cannot be used to build 2-safe database replication. We propose a new group communication primitive called end-to-end atomic broadcast that solves the problem, i.e., can be used to implement 2-safe database replication. We also introduce a new safety criterion, called group-safety, that has advantages both over 1-safety and 2-safety. Experimental results show the gain of efficiency of group-safety over lazy replication, which ensures only 1-safety. © Springer-Verlag 2004.