Commercial distributed database systems generally support an optional protocol that provides loose consistency of replicas, allowing replicas to be inconsistent for some time. In such a protocol, each replicated data item is assigned a primary copy site. Typically, a transaction updates only the primary copies of data items, with updates to other copies deferred until after the transaction commits. After a transaction commits, its updates to primary copies are sent transactionally to the other sites containing secondary copies. We investigate the transaction model underlying the above protocol. We show that global serializability in such a system is a property of the placement of primary and secondary copies of replicated data items. We present a polynomial time algorithm to assign primary sites to data items so that the resulting topology ensures serializability. 1 Introduction A widely used method for improving the reliability and availability of data in distributed databases is ...

A generalization of the majority quorum for the solution of the distributed (k + 1)-exclusion problem is proposed. This scheme produces a family of quorums of varying sizes and availabilities indexed by integral divisors r of k. The cases r = 1 and r = k