Patent ID: 8572031

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for asynchronous replication in a distributed database system, the method comprising the acts of: establishing a primary node within a plurality of nodes, wherein the plurality of nodes comprise the distributed database system and the distributed database system provides responses to database requests from client computer systems; restricting processing of write operations received from the client computer systems to the primary node; establishing at least a plurality of secondary nodes which host a replica of the primary node database from the plurality of nodes; replicating, asynchronously, from the primary node the write operations received from the client computer systems to the plurality of secondary nodes; and automatically recovering a primary node role in the distributed database system in response to a failure of the primary node, wherein the act of automatically recovering includes establishing one of the plurality of secondary nodes as a new primary node, and wherein establishing the one of the plurality of secondary nodes as the new primary node includes deleting replicated write operations received by the new primary node from the primary node to establish a point of consistency within the database between the new primary node and remaining secondary nodes as a new current state of the database.