Consistency management for partial replication in a high performance database cluster

In a database cluster, preventive replication can provide strong consistency without the limitations of synchronous replication. However, the original proposal (E. Pacitti et al., 2003) assumes full replication and has performance limitations. In this paper, we address these two limitations in order to scale up to large cluster configurations. Our first contribution is a refreshment algorithm that reduces the delay introduced by the algorithm and prevents inconsistencies for partially replicated databases. Our second contribution is an optimization that improves transaction throughput. We describe the implementation of our algorithm in our RepDB* prototype over a cluster of 64 nodes running PostgreSQL. Our experimental results using the TPC-C benchmark show that our algorithm has excellent scale up and speed up.