Impact of Latency on Database Replication
Databases store valuable data, such as bank account balances, online store orders, or other business-critical customer data. Databases that manage this data must respond quickly, provide up-to-date information, and remain consistent. A common best practice for achieving these characteristics is to replicate data across multiple nodes and make it accessible from geographically separate locations.
Database replication in distributed systems
Database replication is a mechanism within distributed systems that contributes to fault tolerance and high availability. As organizations operate globally, multi-availability zones are used to deploy infrastructure in different regions via cloud platforms. Database replication helps to keep data consistent between these different availability zones.
Network latency in the replication process
Because data is replicated across regions that are geographically distant from one another, the distance between these zones inevitably introduces network latency into the replication process. In high-speed networks, latency is the most dominant component of the total round-trip time (RTT). Depending on the chosen consistency model and replication configuration, latency can affect database performance, data availability, and data consistency. Latency thus introduces additional complexity in the form of trade-offs between different replication and consistency models within an implementation.
Research objective
The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the impact of network latency on transactional database replication within simulated, geographically dispersed database environments.
