Dave Coombs - Net Integration Technologies, Inc.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot: Replication with WvSync

The line separating the computer from the network is becoming more imaginary. Bandwidth increases, storage gets cheaper, and data gets bigger. Distributed computing becomes fashionable, and replication becomes important.

It's insidious. You don't know it's happening until one day you find a large majority of your developers working on what amounts to replication, in different forms, with different requirements, even in completely different projects, encountering the same tradeoffs from different angles. On that day, we decided we'd had enough.

This paper sheds light on the above, describes replication's requirements and inherent compromises, and puts forth an optimal compromise leading to a general solution that should be useful in any project.

WvSync is the start of an open-source implementation of the general solution, using our WvStreams networking library. Think of it like multidirectional rsync; you can make changes on any node, or on multiple nodes, and the changes will be reflected everywhere. It can be used to synchronize files, database records, email, calendar entries, etc.

After discussing the general solution, this paper illustrates WvSync's design, shows how it can be used to synchronize arbitrary objects in any project, and describes future directions the project may take.

This will be followed by an amazing, earth-shattering, mind-boggling, yet heart-warming demonstration.

Paper

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