VLDB Workshop on Design, Implementation, and 
                Deployment of Database Replication

      in conjunction with the 31st International Conference 
        on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2005) August 28th, 
                      Trondheim, Norway


                http://gorda.di.uminho.pt/wdiddr


Context

Database replication is widely used to improve both the performance
and resilience of database management systems. Although most
commercially available solutions and the large majority of deployments
use asynchronous updates in a shared nothing architecture, there is an
increasing demand for additional guarantees, configuration
flexibility, and manageability, which are currently provided only, if
at all, by costly high-end solutions.

An example is the desire to upgrade current fail-over clusters to an
active-active configuration, thus leveraging the additional
computational resources for additional performance. It should also be
possible to configure eager update replication over a MAN or WAN for
disaster recovery, without resorting to volume replication, thus
improving manageability and performance. The combination of both local
clusters and wide-area systems in grid-style large scale systems poses
new challenges in performance and manageability. The drive for
self-manageable systems also discourages the need for human intervention
in recovery and conflict solving, thus favoring eager update
approaches. Finally, typical loads of current middleware and
applications might allow novel trade-offs between resilience and
performance that are not viable with OLTP loads.

This demand has been addressed by a flock of proposals for eager
update replication that do not use the traditional 2PC-based approach.
These range from middleware based approaches, which often also provide
load balancing of read-only queries, to integrated solutions as
demonstrated in the Postgres-R prototype. Finally, there is a
flourishing academic research trend in group communication based
replication, which offloads many complexity and performance issues to
group communication toolkits and aims at scalable eager update
everywhere replication.

Goal

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from the database and fault-tolerant distributed systems
communities to discuss the current state of the art, pending
challenges and trends, and novel solutions in the design,
implementation and deployment of database replication. The workshop
thus seeks short position papers, including work-in-progress and
experience reports, that foster discussion and bridge the gap between
target communities.
 
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  * cluster, MAN and WAN replication protocols;
  * shared nothing and shared disk eager update replication;
  * replication middleware;
  * novel applications and loads for replicated databases;
  * interfacing the DBMS with replication protocols;
  * replication transparency and client interfaces;
  * performance and dependability benchmarks for replicated databases;
  * fault models and required guarantees;
  * self-manageable and autonomic replicated databases;
  * management interfaces and tools for replicated databases;
  * recovery protocols and tools for replicated databases;
  * group communication based replication;
  * group communication protocols for database replication.

Paper submission

Authors are invited to submit short position papers (no longer than 6
pages in "VLDB format") describing original, previously unpublished
work. Work-in-progress and experience reports, that foster discussion
and bridge the gap between target communities, are specially welcome.

All submitted papers will be reviewed by the program committee. At
least one author of an accepted paper is expected to attend the
workshop in order to present the work. The authors are requested to
send their contributions to datarep@lsd.di.uminho.pt no later than
June 1st, 2005, as a postscript or PDF file.

Important Dates

Papers due: June 1, 2005.
Notification: July 1, 2005.
Camera ready: July 15, 2005.
Workshop: August 28, 2005.

Committees

Program Chair:
  * R. Oliveira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

Organizing Chair:
  * J. Pereira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

Program Committee:
  * Emmanuel Cecchet (EMIC Networks & ObjectWeb Consortium, Finland)
  * Jonathan Goldstein (Microsoft, USA)
  * Bettina Kemme (McGill University, Canada)
  * Thomas Lane (RedHat Inc., USA)
  * Henqrique Madeira (Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal)
  * Marta Patiño-Martínez (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
  * Fernando Pedone (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland)
  * Luís Rodrigues (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
  * Jonathan Stanton (George Washington University, USA) 
  * Jean-Bernard Stefani (INRIA, France)
  * Lars Thalmann (MySQL AB)
  * Jan Wieck (Afilias Inc., Ireland)

Additional Information

The workshop is organized in association with the VLDB conference
(http://www.vldb2005.org) by the GORDA project (FP6-IST2-004758)
(http://gorda.di.uminho.pt) For more informations contact the
organization at datarep@lsd.di.uminho.pt.