An interoperability approach based on asynchronous replication among distributed internet databases

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in telemedicine in Brazil, because the country is the fifth largest country in the world and there is a huge gap between the population size and the number of available doctors. Institutions and the government are considering solutions for the integration and availability of data produced by several different systems. In this paper we present a contribution that is characterized by an asynchronous replication strategy between distributed medical databases. The contribution, named PGR, is an enhancement to the PostgreSQL database software that introduces lightweight asynchronous operations. In addition, we have implemented a multi-master engine with partial replication and hybrid fragmentation in order to allow interoperability between different telemedicine systems. Our early results indicate that the model and its implementation have reached a successful level in terms of performance and interoperability.