Bayou accommodates these applications by helping them manage weakly consistent data. Bayou does not attempt to be transparent. Applications should use specific knowledge of their data, along with the knowledge that data may be stale, to detect and resolve conflicts. Two applications are studied, a bibliographic database and a meeting room scheduler. A client may connect to any server for reading and writing data.
Servers replicate all data, and synchronize using pair-wise communication.
A primary server is the authoritative source of consistency. Programs resolve conflicts with each write. Resolution may involve cascading back-outs. Procedures must be deterministic so that they may be replayed on multiple machines. When a write occurs, it is considered tentative until committed at the primary server.