Transaction-Based Grid Database Replication

We present a framework for grid database replication. Data replication is one of the most useful
strategies to achieve high levels of availability and fault tolerance as well as minimal access time in
grids. It is commonly demanded by many grid applications. However, most existing grid replication
systems only deal with read-only files. By contrast, several relational database vendors provide
tools that offer transaction-based replication, but the capabilities of these products are insufficient to
address grid issues. They lack scalability and cannot cope with the heterogeneous nature of grid
resources.
Our approach uses existing grid mechanisms to provide a metadata registry and to make initial
replicas of data resources. We then define high-level APIs for managing transaction-based
replication. These APIs can be mapped to a variety of relational database replication mechanisms
allowing us to use existing vendor-specific solutions. The next stage in the project will use OGSA-
DAI to manage replication across multiple domains. In this way, our framework can support
transaction-based database synchronisation that maintains consistency in a data-intensive, large-
scale distributed, disparate networking environment.