Reliability and Availability Properties of Distributed Database Systems

Distributed database systems represent an essential component of modern enterprise application architectures. If the overall application needs to provide reliability and availability, the database has to guarantee these properties as well. Entailing non-functional database features such as replication, consistency, conflict management, and partitioning represent subsequent challenges for successfully designing and operating an available and reliable database system. In this document, we identify why these concepts are important for databases and classify their design options. Moreover, we survey how eleven modern database systems implement these reliability and availability properties.