Abstract
Traditional protocols for distributed database management have a high message overhead; restrain or lock access to resources during protocol execution; and may become impractical for some scenarios like real-time systems and very large distributed databases. In this article, we present the demarcation protocol; it overcomes these problems by using explicit consistency constraints as the correctness criteria. The method establishes safe limits as “lines drawn in the sand” for updates, and makes it possible to change these limits dynamically, enforcing the constraints at all times. We show how this technique can be applied to linear arithmetic, existential, key, and approximate copy constraints.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alonso, R., Barbará, D., and Garcia-Molina, H. Data caching issues in an information retrieval system.ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 15(3):359–384, 1990.
Breitbart, Y., Garcia-Molina, H., and Silberschatz, A. Overview of multidatabase transaction management.VLDB Journal, 2(2):181–239, 1992.
Bernstein, P.A., Hadzilacos, V., and Goodman, N.Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987.
Carvalho, O.S.F. and Roucariol, G. On the distribution of an assertion.Proceedings of the ACM-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Ottawa, Canada, 1982.
Date, C.J.:An Introduction to Database Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.
Davidson, S.B. An optimistic protocol for partitioned distributed database sytems. Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University. October, 1982.
Du, W. and Elmagarmid, A. Quasi-serializability: A correctness criterion for global concurrency control in InterBase.Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Amsterdam, 1989.
Fernández, M.F. and Zdonik, S.B. Transaction groups: A model for controlling cooperative work.Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems. Queensland, Australia, 1989.
Fischer, J.M., Griffeth, N.D., and Lynch, N.A. Global states of a distributed system.IEEE transactions on Software Engineering, 8(3):198–202, 1982.
Garcia-Molina, H. Using semantic knowledge for transaction processing in a distributed database.ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 8(2):186–213, 1983.
Hammer, M.M. and Shipman, D.W. The reliability mechanisms of SDD-1: A system for distributed databases. Computer Corporation of America Technical Report CCA-80-84, 1980.
Korth, H.F. and Speegle, G.D. Formal model of correctness without serializability.Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, IL, 1988.
Krishnakumar, N. and Bernstein, A.J. High throughput escrow algorithms for replicated databases.Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Vancouver, BC, 1992.
Kumar, A. and Stonebraker, M. Semantics-based transaction management techniques for replicated data.Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, IL, 1988.
Lynch, N.A., Blaustein, B., and Siegel, M. Correctness conditions for highly available replicated data.Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Systems, Calgary, Canada, 1986.
O'Neil, P. The escrow transactional method.ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 11(4):405–430, 1986.
Pu, C. and Leff, A. Replica control, in distributed systems: An asynchronous approach.Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on the Management of Data, Denver, CO, 1991.
Soparkar, N. and Silberschatz, A. Data-value partitioning and virtual messages.Proceedings of the Conference on the Principles of Database Systems, Nashville, TN, 1990.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Barbará-Millá, D., Garcia-Molina, H. The demarcation protocol: A technique for maintaining constraints in distributed database systems. VLDB Journal 3, 325–353 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01232643
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01232643