RECORD OPERATION MODE SETTING

Designers and implementers of distributed databases have to make difficult trade-offs between reliability, throughput, latency, ease of use, ease of administration and the quality of service provided to applications. Choosing these trade-offs is particularly difficult, as different applications often have widely varying requirements, meaning that different distributed database systems tend to specialise in particular types of application. A method is presented for architecting a distributed database in such a way that applications can make their needs known within fine-grained scopes (e.g., an individual database operation), and the database system can then use this information to alter the trade-offs it makes, thereby improving the quality of service experienced by the application, users, and administrators.