Patent 9460126 was granted and assigned to Amazon on October, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A distributed database management system may comprise a group of partitions that includes a master writeable partition and one or more additional partitions that act as read-only replicas of the master. A rotational mechanism for performing maintenance operations on non-master partitions may be employed to transition a second partition, selected for undergoing maintenance, into a role as the new master following performance of the maintenance operation.