Abstract: An automated method of maintaining replication topology information is presented that allows system maintenance to occur with a minimum of system administrator intervention. For a replicated and distributed database across a network of computers, the network is divided or partitioned into sites that are islands of good network connectivity wherein communication between the site computers occurs using high bandwidth, low-latency remote procedure calls (RPCs). Further, intersite connections allow communication between servers of different sites using a low bandwidth, high-latency store and forward messaging scheme. Knowledge consistency checkers running independently on each individual server in the entire network assures that the servers within a site are automatically connected in a full-mesh replication topology within a site and that the sites themselves are connected via a spanning tree of intersite links.

Abstract: The directory service of the present invention extends the mechanism used to define ordinary properties to define "links," pairs of properties that represent an interobject reference with a certain meaning. Each pair is given a unique "pair ID" and consists of a "link" property and a "backlink" property, which represent the "reference" and "is referenced by" semantics, respectively. Rather than storing interobject references with the referencing and/or the referenced objects themselves and imputing the link, instead the present invention stores the link instance itself as an unnamed object in a link database table, which is separate and distinct from the data information base, and imputes the values to be reported for the relevant properties on the referencing and referenced objects from the existence of records in the link table.