Brief announcement: optimistic algorithms for partial database replication

Database replication protocols based on group communication have recently received a lot of attention. The main reason for this stems from the fact that group communication primitives offer adequate properties, namely agreement on the messages delivered and on their order, to implement synchronous database replication. Most of the complexity involved in synchronizing database replicas is handled by the group communication layer. Previous work on group-communication-based database replication has focused mainly on full replication. However, full replication might not always be adequate. First, sites might not have enough disk or memory resources to fully replicate the database. Second, when access locality is observed, full replication is pointless. Third, full replication provides limited scalability since every update transaction should be executed by each replica.