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Serverless Replication

The earlier state diagrams can be carried over from a primary replica configuration to a serverless configuration without any change. In a serverless configuration, when a replica modifies a component it becomes the source for distributing these modifications to other replicas. In practice, however, not all replicas have to read the modifications directly from the source replica and replicas can get these modifications from some other replica that in turn got the modifications from the source replica.

Independently of how the modifications are propagated, the last writer has a full-fidelity version of the component and is perceived by other replicas as the source for this version. Hence, the replica that writes the component last becomes effectively a temporary ``primary replica'' for the component that it modified. The states and state transitions otherwise remain the same. If a replica wants to progressively read the component from the primary replica, it needs to maintain a Partial-Clean state. If the temporary primary replica for a particular component wishes to progressively propagate its modifications (i.e., in a push-based implementation), it needs to maintain a Pseudo-Dirty state. If it wants to update more than one replica concurrently, it needs to maintain the progress of each individual transmission as part of that state.


next up previous
Next: Summary Up: Incorporating Fidelity in Replication Previous: Optimistic Replication
Eyal de Lara 2003-03-04