Self-stabilization and eventual consistency in replicated real-time databases

Abstract

Distributed databases generally have strict consistency requirements on data replicas, meaning that they are not allowed to diverge outside of transaction boundaries. For certain applications, this is too pessimistic, and it is often better to trade off consistency for higher availability, performance, or predictability. In this paper, we describe a replication protocol for a distributed database which is eventually consistent; it allows replicas to diverge if the system can be guaranteed to eventually converge to a consistent state. We also compare eventual consistency to self-stabilization, and outline how self-stabilization theory may help in proving properties of eventually consistent systems.