A Generic Algorithm for Transaction Processing During Network Partitioning

Abstract. This research presents an algorithm that allows transaction processing to proceed during site failures and network partitioning while ensuring the consistency of replicated data. Our algorithm can be used together with various voting schemes which provide varying degrees of data availability. Different voting schemes may be used simul-taneously for different groups,'of data. Our algorithm contains as special cases: the site quorum method in which the ~ is a single distinguished partition, and the virtual partition method in which a (possibly different) distinguished partition is determined for each logical data item. By grouping data items in various ways, our algorithm can be tuned to yield methods which lie between these two extremes. 1