Hi Roman,

> > If anybody remembers seeing related research, I would certainly
> > be interested to read it.
>
> I have made some tries to wake up the interest to this paper in our
> community, but no success... The research group in which Bettina
> Kemme worked at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich has
> another nice overview paper about the replication in distributed
> systems and in databases and the differences between them:"Database
> Replication Techniques: A Three Parameter Classification" - check
> it, it has very nice overview. (If you do not find it, send me
> email - I have a copy somewhere).

Found it:
http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~kemme/publications.html
It would seem I now have enough material to get me through summer.

> Now, if we come to "cloud" databases - check the Sequoia clustered
> JDBC driver (former C-JDBC) - same idea: parse the SQL on one node,
> send commands to other nodes in cluster (in Sequoia's case - SQL,
> but that can be cured), use strict transaction ordering, use group
> communication for node load balancing and clustering. BTW, it works
> fine with Firebird - I made a presentation about it on our
> conference... Only it seems that when people hear "JDBC driver"
> they loose the interest at once :)

Will check that too. Seems to me that Sequoia is the kind of
middleware approach that Bettina Kemme thinks is fataly flawed, but I
haven't thought it through enough to have an own opinion. Seems to me
that you are a few years ahead of most of us (don't cut off your ear
like Van Gogh now :^)

> Looks like the idea is not new, only that developers have grown to
> the fact where they can accept basic database functionality in
> return for improved scalability.

Perhaps back in the 1998-2000 time frame it was ... I don't know. In
any case, it is not hard to convince me that true innovation is few
and far between in the software world.

> P.S. Buy me a beer and I will make you a short summary of the
> research papers in years 2000-2003/4 when I was investing a lot of
> time into this topic :)

Mrs. Kemme's publications list will shut me up for weeks and months.
Will buy you a beer anytime.

Paul