Delta State replicated data types

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Date
2018
Authors
Paulo Sérgio Almeida
Ali Shoker
Carlos Baquero
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Abstract
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are distributed data types that make eventual consistency of a distributed object possible and non ad-hoc. Specifically, state-based CRDTs ensure convergence through disseminating the entire state, that may be large, and merging it to other replicas. We introduce Delta State Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (delta-CRDT) that can achieve the best of both operation-based and state-based CRDTs: small messages with an incremental nature, as in operation-based CRDTs, disseminated over unreliable communication channels, as in traditional state-based CRDTs. This is achieved by defining delta-mutators to return a delta-state, typically with a much smaller size than the full state, that to be joined with both local and remote states. We introduce the delta-CRDT framework, and we explain it through establishing a correspondence to current state-based CRDTs. In addition, we present an anti-entropy algorithm for eventual convergence, and another one that ensures causal consistency. Finally, we introduce several delta-CRDT specifications of both well-known replicated datatypes and novel datatypes, including a generic map composition.
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