Experimental assessment of COTS DBMS robustness under transient faults

Author

Costa, Diamantino ; Madeira, Henrique

Author_Institution

Coimbra Univ., Portugal

fYear

1999

fDate

1999

Firstpage

201

Lastpage

208

Abstract

This paper evaluates the behavior of a common off-the-shelf (COTS) database management system (DBMS) in presence of transient faults. Database applications have traditionally been a field with fault-tolerance needs, concerning both data integrity and availability. While most of the commercially available DBMS provide support for data recovery and fault-tolerance, very limited knowledge was available regarding the impact of transient faults in a COTS database system. In this experimental study, a strict off-the-shelf target system is used (Oracle 7.3 server running on top of Wintel platform), combined with a TPC-A based workload and a software implemented fault injection tool, XceptionNT. It was found out that a non-negligible amount of induced faults, 13%, lead to the database server hanging or premature termination. However, the results also show that COTS DBMS products has a reasonable behavior concerning data integrity, none of the injected faults affected end user data

Keywords

data integrity; database management systems; software fault tolerance; software performance evaluation; system recovery; COTS DBMS robustness; Oracle 7.3 server; TPC-A based workload; Wintel platform; XceptionNT; availability; data integrity; data recovery; database server; fault injection tool; fault-tolerance; premature termination; transient faults; Application software; Checkpointing; Database systems; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Hardware; Robustness; Software tools; Spatial databases; Transaction databases;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Dependable Computing, 1999. Proceedings. 1999 Pacific Rim International Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0371-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PRDC.1999.816230

Filename

816230