Paul,

>
> I'm ignoring your remarks on serialization, as you have not defined what
> you mean by serialization in a distributed context.
>

What Jim means is that if you record the state of the database
with all nodes stopped and all uncommitted records discarded,
then start all nodes, run some number of transactions, then
stop all processing on all nodes and discard all uncommitted
results, the state of the database on all nodes will be identical
and it will be equivalent to the result of having run all those
transactions serially in some order.

As for the single lost node problem, not so important since
everything is in at least two places and there is failover
for all chairman activities. A node that has lost communication
comes back like any new node. Partition is a harder problem.

Regards,

Ann