  Recent trends in information management involve the periodic transcription of
data onto secondary devices in a networked environment, and the proper
scheduling of these transcriptions is critical for efficient data management.
To assist in the scheduling process, we are interested in modeling the
reduction of consistency over time between a relation and its replica, termed
obsolescence of data. The modeling is based on techniques from the field of
stochastic processes, and provides several stochastic models for content
evolution in the base relations of a database, taking referential integrity
constraints into account. These models are general enough to accommodate most
of the common scenarios in databases, including batch insertions and life spans
both with and without memory. As an initial "proof of concept" of the
applicability of our approach, we validate the insertion portion of our model
framework via experiments with real data feeds. We also discuss a set of
transcription protocols which make use of the proposed stochastic model.

Databases