What Price Replication?

Replicated data is employed in distributed databases to enhance dataavailability. However, the benefit of data availability is only realized atthe cost of elaborate algorithms which hide the underlying complexity ofmaintaining multiple copies of a single data item. The concern about theperformance impact of replica control is part of the reasons why replication,although extensively researched, has yet to receive wide acceptance inpractice.This paper makes use of a simulation model to explore the performance tradeoffsof data replication.