Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Although database replication has been a standard feature in database management systems for a long time, third party replication and clustering middleware has been enjoying an increasing popularity. At the same time, recent research in database replication based on group communication shows that it is possible to achieve consistent replication without the overhead of traditional synchronous replication. Unfortunately, both such approaches require wrapping the DBMS, thus incurring in a large development effort and some performance overhead, or worst, on modifications to the DBSM kernel itself. This talk addresses this with a novel middleware architecture and programming interface for replication, such that different replication strategies can be implemented on top of any compliant database in a cost-effective manner. First it identifies key functionality for representative replication protocols. Then it proposes a middleware interface to expose its functionality and evaluate its implementation in both PostgreSQL and Apache Derby.

Rui Oliveira is associate professor at the Computer Science Department of Minho University and director of the Computer Science and Technology Center. His research interests are focused on dependable distributed systems and cover consistent database replication, distributed agreement problems and gossip-based communication protocols. He is the coordinator of the european IST GORDA project on open replication of databases and previously led several research projects on the field.