Formal Development of Fault Tolerant Transactions for a replicated Database using Ordered Broadcasts

Abstract

Data replication across several sites improves fault tolerance as available sites can take over the load of failed sites. Data is usually accessed within a transactional framework. However, updating replicated data within a transactional framework is a complex affair due to failures and conflicting transactions. Group communication primitives have been proposed to support transactions in a asynchronous distributed system. In this paper we outline how a refinement based approach with Event B can be used for the development of a reliable replicated database system that ensure atomic commitment of update transactions using group communication primitives