I came across this algorithm used for generating a consensus among distributed systems, recording the material I liked/groked among it all
- The original paper by Leslie Lamport
- The Wikipedia page, with some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
- A (blogpost](http://blog.aetherworks.com/2013/05/paxos-by-example/) - A comment on Reddit mentions that this might be the cleanest explanations around, and I agree.
- Any list of links on Paxos cannot be complete without a reference to the FLP impossibility explained here and the original paper is available here
- A blogpost that would make sense after I’ve slept over this algorithm a little, and tried implementing it. These are the experiences of implementing it for Windows Azure.
- Yet another paper that talks about an implementation, this time by Google
I’m still looking for an example of how this is done in databases though.