Abstract
Many quorum consensus protocols have been proposed for the management of replicated data in a distributed environment. The advantages of a replicated database system over a non-replicated one include high availability and low response time. We note further that the multiple sites can act as multiple agents so that at any time, multiple requests can be handled in parallel. This feature leads to the desirable consequence of high workload capacity. In this paper, we define a new metric of read-capacity for this feature. We propose a new protocol called diamond quorum consensus which has two major properties that are superior to the previous protocols of majority, tree, grid, and hierarchical quorum consensus: (1) it has the highest read-capacity, (2) it has the smallest optimal read quorum size of 2. We show that these two features are achievable without jeopardizing the availability. The small quorum size is a significant feature because it relates to the messaging cost. Few previous work on quorum consensus has discussed the handling of partition failure, which in many cases will depend on the quorum consensus protocol, we show how we can use the generalized virtual partition protocol to handle partition failure in the case of diamond quorum consensus.
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Fu, A.WC., Wong, Y.S. & Wong, M.H. Diamond Quorum Consensus for High Capacity and Efficiency in a Replicated Database System. Distributed and Parallel Databases 8, 471–492 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008785706349
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008785706349