Conflict-Free Replicated Relations for Multi-Synchronous Database Management at Edge

Abstract

In a cloud-edge environment, edge devices may not always be connected to the network. Still, applications may need to access the data on edge devices even when they are not connected. With support for multi-synchronous access, data on an edge device are kept synchronous with the data in the cloud as long as the device is online. When the device is offline, the application can still access the data on the device, asynchronously with concurrent data updates either in the cloud or on other edge devices. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) emerged as a technology for multi-synchronous data access. CRDTs guarantee that when all sites have applied the same set of updates, the replicated data converge. However, CRDTs have not been successfully applied to relational databases (RDBs) for multi-synchronous access. In this paper, we present Conflict-free Replicated Relations (CRRs) that apply CRDTs to RDBs for support of multi-synchronous data access. With CRR, existing RDB applications, with very little modification, can be enhanced with multi-synchronous access. We also present a prototype implementation of CRR with some preliminary performance results.