Transactions , Messages and Events : Merging Group Communication and Database Systems – extended abstract –

In this paper, we report on the DRAGON (Database Replication on Group Communication) project and the results obtained so far at ETH Zürich. The goal of DRAGON is to improve database replication strategies by using grou p communication primitives. As a first step in this direction, we have developed a suite of protocols implementing database replication based on broadcast primitives. We are currently embedding these protocols into a database management system to show the feasibility of the approach. In this short paper, we briefly discuss these protocols and analyze how they can be included in a database system. Our contribution is to further clarify the effort involved in th e process and to explicitly state some of the issues commonly not considered by existing work. These issues are analyzed in detail and solutions are provided taking as example our current development efforts.

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