Domino System Administration

Understanding Replication

Many products use some sort of replication to distribute data among multiple data servers. Most of them do so in a master/slave manner, in which one copy of the database is the master copy to which all new changes are written, and all other copies are read-only slaves. Alternatively, there may be multiple master copies, but typically the masters divide up responsibility for different segments of the data, so that only one master exists for each part of the data.

Databases usually have to work this way to maintain data integrity—to avoid the occurrence of separate, independent changes in two copies of the database. Most data management systems cannot allow such changes to occur because they have no way of reconciling ...