US Patent 9020891 Reduced locking in a distributed data store

Disclosed are various embodiments for reducing locking in a distributed data store that includes a primary data store and one or more secondary data stores. An update to a data item that is to be applied to the distributed data store is obtained in one or more computing devices. The update is applied to a cached version of the data item when a lock is held. The update is replicated to the one or more data stores after the lock is released. It is determined that the update is durably persisted in the distributed data store after obtaining a replication confirmation from each of at least a predetermined number of the secondary data stores.