Abstract

. Many distributed databases use an epidemic approach to manage replicated data. In this approach, user operations are executed on a single replica. Asynchronously, a separate activity performs periodic pair-wise comparison of data item copies to detect and bring up to date obsolete copies. The overhead due to comparison of data copies grows linearly with the number of data items in the database, which limits the scalability of the system. We propose an epidemic protocol whose overhead is linear in the number of data items being copied during update propagation. Since this number is typically much smaller than the total number of data items in the database, our protocol promises significant reduction of overhead. 1 Introduction Data replication is often used in distributed systems to improve system availability and performance. Examples of replicated systems abound and include both research prototypes (e.g., [5, 14]) and commercial systems (e.g., [8, 10]). Many of these systems use an...

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