Voting as the Optimal Static Pessimistic Scheme for Managing Replicated Data

This paper investigates the problem of finding an optimal static pessimistic replica control scheme. It has been widely accepted that coteries (proposed by Garcia-Molina and Barbara) provide the most general framework for such schemes. We demonstrate that voting schemes, a very small subset of static pessimistic schemes, are optimal for fully connected networks with negligible link failure rates, as well as for Ethernet systems. We also show that voting is not optimal for somewhat more general systems. We propose a modification of the algorithm of Z. Tong and R.Y. Kain (1988) for computing optimal voting in operation independent case, so that it runs in linear (rather than exponential) time. Finally, we propose the first efficient algorithm for computing the optimal vote assignment and appropriate thresholds for fully connected networks when relative frequencies of read and write operations are known. We also extend this result to Ethernet systems. >