
160 ◾ Information Systems: What Every Business Student Needs to Know
decide what to do if some copies cannot be updated right away for any reason,
such as failure of the computers on which they reside or the network connections
to them.
• With asynchronous replication, copies may be updated later. If there is a
master database, all the locations will eventually match it. If not, a con-
flict resolution process is necessary to deal with independent changes. For
example, a database might store a document that can be edited by several
people. If two people edit a paragraph at about the same time, the DBMS
must figure out how to handle the update. ...