Microsoft Corporation
Merge trees for collaboration

Abstract:

Disclosed embodiments provide for collaborative access to a distributed data structure. The disclosed embodiments include collaboration participant devices or instances that each represent a distributed data structure via a tree data structure. The collaboration participants perform operations on the distributed data structure and communicate these operations to each other via a serialization service. The tree structure maintained by each of the collaboration participants stores unacknowledged operations and also collaboration participant specific length information for collaboration participants. Once a particular operation has been acknowledged by each of the collaboration participants, this is communicated to all of the participants by the serialization service. The collaboration participants may then perform maintenance on a portion of the tree structure represented the acknowledged operation. For example, nodes of the tree representing adjacent data in the distributed data structure may be combined, or data removed by an acknowledged operation may be removed from the tree.