At RICON 2012, Sean Cribbs and Russell Brown from Basho presented a demo of convergent counters in Riak 1.4. These counters, in the event of a network partition, would correctly converge to the right value after concurrent updates when the partition healed. These data types were one of many types of CRDTs, or Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types, outlined in the seminal work by Shapiro et al. "A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types."
It is now two years later, and Riak 2.0 provides a series of "data types," which come out of a body of research from both Basho, and the partners of a European Union funded research project known as SyncFree.
In this talk we will discuss the goals of the SyncFree project. We will start with use cases highlighting success and limitations of CRDTs, and discuss how each of the individual project deliverables set out to address the issues raised by the use cases. We will give an overview of the status of the project today, pointers where our research can be downloaded, and our plans for the coming year.
In this talk we will discuss the goals of the SyncFree project. We will start with use cases highlighting success and limitations of CRDTs, and discuss how each of the individual project deliverables set out to address the issues raised by the use cases. We will give an overview of the status of the project today, pointers where our research can be downloaded, and our plans for the coming year.