Target-based database synchronization
Madhu V. Ahluwalia, Ruchika Gupta, Aryya Gangopadhyay, Yelena Yesha, Michael J. McAllister · 2010
Synchronizing source and target databases is an important task in many database applications. There are instances when the synchronization of source and target databases must be driven from the target's side and involve no changes to the source's schema or triggers. We describe an algorithm for such synchronization. Our algorithm groups tuples into partitions and compares hashes of matching source and target partitions before synchronizing only those partitions whose hashes do not match. The hash comparisons decrease the number of tuples that must be exchanged when the source and target are nearly synchronized already. Two variants of full replication that differ on locking strategies are used as benchmarks. Empirical results show that our method outperforms both when there are few changes to the database and outperforms row-level locking when fewer than 70% of the partitions are changed.