Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16

Replicated Data Management

16.1 Introduction

Data replication is an age-old technique for tolerating faults, increasing data availability, and reducing latency in data access. With online activities taking over our lives, our critical data, both personal and professional, are being increasingly stored in data centers somewhere in the globe. Such data are replicated across multiple data centers either proactively or reactively, so that even when some of the copies are lost due to a crash or become inaccessible due to a network partition, our data still remain intact and accessible. Cached copies of downloaded data on our personal devices enable us to use them even if the network connectivity is absent. Apart from data backup, replication ...