Incremental recovery in main memory database systems

Recovery activities, like checkpointing and restart, in traditional database management systems are performed in a quiescent state where no transactions are active. This approach impairs the performance of online transaction processing systems, especially when a large volatile memory is used. An incremental scheme for performing recovery in main memory database systems (MMDBs), in parallel with transaction execution, is presented. A page-based incremental restart algorithm that enables the resumption of transaction processing as soon as the system is up is proposed. Pages are recovered individually and according to the demands of the post-crash transactions. A method for propagating updates from main memory to the backup database on disk is also provided. The emphasis is on decoupling the I/O activities related to the propagation to disk from the forward transaction execution in memory. The authors also construct a high-level recovery manager based on operation logging on top of the page-based algorithms. The proposed algorithms are motivated by the characteristics of large MMDBs, and exploit the technology of nonvolatile RAM