Data Consistency in a Distributed Persistent Object System

A major issue in persistent systems is preserving data consistency in the presence of concurrency and failures. This paper presents a persistent system PC++ that takes an atomic data type approach to resolving this issue. Unlike existing systems, support for atomic data types in PC++ is implicit so that programmers are required to do very little extra work to make an object atomic. Programmers implement atomic data types as if for a sequential and reliable environment and specify the conflict relationship between object operations separately in a small, but expressive declarative language. The PC++ system will then automatically provide appropriate synchronisation and recovery code for atomic objects according to their conflict relation. 1 Introduction The advent of high bandwidth local area ATM networks has transformed the potential of distributed computing systems. Current storage services are unable to meet the requirements of emerging application areas such as multimedia applicati..