Causally Consistent Recovery of Partially Replicated Logs

Abstract

An algorithm is presented for the consistent recovery of replicated data in a client-server system. The algorithm is based on logging and is similar to the optimistic techniques that are well known in the literature. However, unlike in existing optimistic techniques, explicit dependency information is not maintained. Instead, dependency information is estimated from the ordering of messages found in servers' logs. These dependency estimates can, in general, be expensive to compute. It is therefore shown how inexpensive estimates can be applied when a system is well structured.