Exploiting Atomic Broadcast in Replicated Databases

Exploiting Atomic Broadcast in Replicated Databases F.Pedone, R.Guerraoui and A.Schiper Database replication protocols have historically been built on top of distributed database systems, and have consequently been designed and implemented using distributed transactional mechanisms, such as atomic commitment. We argue in this paper that this approach is not always adequate to efficiently support database replication and that more suitable alternatives, such as atomic broadcast primitives, should be employed instead. More precisely, we show in this paper that fully replicated database systems, based on the deferred update replication model, have better throughput and response time if implemented with an atomic broadcast termination protocol than if implemented with atomic commitment.