The Demarcation Protocol: A Technique for Maintaining Arithmetic Constraints in Distributed Database Systems

Abstract:

Traditional protocols for distributed database management have high
message overhead, lock or restrain access to resources during protocol
execution, and may become impractical for some scenarios like real-time
systems and very large distributed databases. In this paper we present
the demarcation protocol; it overcomes these problems through the use
of explicit arithmetic consistency constraints as the correctness
criteria. The method establishes safe limits as "lines drawn in the
sand" for updates and gives a way of changing these limits dynamically,
enforcing the constraints at all times.