Pronto: High Availability for Standard Off-the-shelf Databases

Enterprise applications typically store their state in databases. If a database fails, the application is unavailable while the database recovers. Database recovery is time consuming because it involves replaying the persistent transaction log. To isolate end-users from database failures we introduce Pronto, a protocol to orchestrate the transaction processing by multiple, standard databases so that they collectively implement the illusion of a single, highly-available database. Pronto is a novel replication protocol that handles non-determinism without relying on perfect failure detection, does not require any modifications in existing applications and databases, and allows databases from different providers to be part of the replicated compound.