Due to severe performance penalties associated with
synchronous replication, there seems to be a significant interest in asynchronous
replica management protocols. In the commercial arena, these protocols
are referred to as lazy replication since database transactions are executed
locally, and the effects of these transactions are incorporated lazily
on remote database copies. Lazy protocols currently in use either do not
guarantee consistency and serializability as needed by transactional semantics
or they impose restrictions on placement of data and which data object
can be updated. In this short paper we investigate an epidemic update protocol
that guarantees consistency and serializability in spite of a write-anywhere
capability. We conducted experiments on a detailed simulation of a distributed,
replicated database to evaluate this protocol. Our results establish that
the lazy but consistent approach is indeed viable for a variety of database
environments and workloads.