article

Are quorums an alternative for data replication?

Authors:

Ricardo Jiménez-Peris,

M. Patiño-Martínez,

Gustavo Alonso,

Bettina KemmeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 28, Issue 3

Pages 257 - 294

https://doi.org/10.1145/937598.937601

Published: 01 September 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Data replication is playing an increasingly important role in the design of parallel information systems. In particular, the widespread use of cluster architectures often requires to replicate data for performance and availability reasons. However, maintaining the consistency of the different replicas is known to cause severe scalability problems. To address this limitation, quorums are often suggested as a way to reduce the overall overhead of replication. In this article, we analyze several quorum types in order to better understand their behavior in practice. The results obtained challenge many of the assumptions behind quorum based replication. Our evaluation indicates that the conventional read-one/write-all-available approach is the best choice for a large range of applications requiring data replication. We believe this is an important result for anybody developing code for computing clusters as the read-one/write-all-available strategy is much simpler to implement and more flexible than quorum-based approaches. In this article, we show that, in addition, it is also the best choice using a number of other selection criteria.

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Index Terms

Are quorums an alternative for data replication?
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Evaluation of retrieval results

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cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 28, Issue 3

September 2003

86 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/937598

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Copyright © 2003 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2003

Published in TODS Volume 28, Issue 3

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