Data replication gaining popularity

D ata replication is a core concern in the real-time delivery of data, which underlies the booming marketplace of Web-based computing and mobile-computing applications. Sushil Jajodia recently spoke to two key figures involved in the development of replication protocols at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies—Yuri Breitbart and Hank Korth. Yuri Breitbart is a member of the technical staff in the Database Principles Research Department at Bell Labs, where he researches distributed systems and databases. Earlier, he spent 10 years as a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. He has published numerous papers in the area of heterogeneous distributed and replicated databases and currently serves an associate editor of Distributed and Parallel Database International Journal. Henry F. Korth is the head of Bell Labs’ Database Principles Research Department. Earlier, he was a vice president of Panasonic Technologies and director of the Matsushita Information Technology Lab. For nine years, he served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He is coauthor of Database System Concepts and coeditor of Mobile Computing. “A Model of CAD Transactions,” which he coauthored, was chosen as “Most Influential Paper from the Proceedings of Ten Years Ago,” at the 1995 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. Here are their views on data replication.