Appeared in the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Management of Replicated Data

Ficus is a exible replication facility with optimistic concurrency control designed to span a wide range of scales and network environments. Support for partitioned operation is fundamental to the Ficus design but was not widely exercised in early Ficus use. This position paper reports recent experiences using Ficus in settings where some replicas are only occasionally connected to a network, and hence partitioned operation is the rule rather than the exception. We conclude that with some tuning, Ficus adapted quite well to primarily disconnected operation.