Partial Replication in the Database State Machine¤ António SOUSA

This paper investigates the use of partial replication in the Database State Machine approach introduced ear-lier for fully replicated databases. It builds on the or-der and atomicity properties of group communication primitives to achieve strong consistency and proposes two new abstractions: Resilient Atomic Commit and Fast Atomic Broadcast. Even with atomic broadcast, partial replication re-quires a termination protocol such as atomic commit to ensure transaction atomicity. With Resilient Atomic Commit our termination protocol allows the commit of a transaction despite the failure of some of the par-ticipants. Preliminary performance studies suggest that the additional cost of supporting partial replica-tion can be mitigated through the use of Fast Atomic Broadcast. 1