Version Reconciliation for Collaborative Databases

TL;DR

This paper introduces MindPalace, a versioned database system designed for offline collaborative data management, featuring a formal framework for automatic branch reconciliation through auto-mergeability detection.

Contribution

It formalizes auto-mergeability in versioned databases and develops an efficient method to determine and facilitate automatic branch reconciliation.

Findings

Formalization of auto-mergeability condition

Efficient framework for branch reconciliation

Support for offline collaborative data management

Abstract

We propose MindPalace, a prototype of a versioned database for efficient collaborative data management. MindPalace supports offline collaboration, where users work independently without real-time correspondence. The core of MindPalace is a critical step of offline collaboration: reconciling divergent branches made by simultaneous data manipulation. We formalize the concept of auto-mergeability, a condition under which branches may be reconciled without human intervention, and propose an efficient framework for determining whether two branches are auto-mergeable and identifying particular records for manual reconciliation.