Propagating updates in a highly replicated database

Consideration is given to the problem of propagating messages to a large number of hosts in a distributed database. The work of propagating the message is distributed and minimized among the hosts by arranging them into a minimum-cost spanning tree. Only the cooperation of the hosts that belong to the database is required. Transient and permanent failures are handled in this protocol. Eventual delivery and propagation within a network partition are guaranteed despite failures. This is achieved without requiring a large amount of information to be stored and maintained by each host, even when many hosts in the database may initiate updates