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Failure Classification in DBMS

A database failure occurs when a system is unable to provide required functionality correctly. There are three types of failures in a database management system (DBMS): transaction failures, disk failures, and system crashes. Transaction failures happen when operations cannot be completed, such as due to application or IO errors. Disk failures are caused by hardware errors affecting the disk drive. System crashes are often due to software bugs but sometimes hardware errors, corrupting the operating system. When recovering from a system crash, the recovery system reads logs backwards and maintains undo and redo lists to determine which transactions require undoing or redoing.

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495 views2 pages

Failure Classification in DBMS

A database failure occurs when a system is unable to provide required functionality correctly. There are three types of failures in a database management system (DBMS): transaction failures, disk failures, and system crashes. Transaction failures happen when operations cannot be completed, such as due to application or IO errors. Disk failures are caused by hardware errors affecting the disk drive. System crashes are often due to software bugs but sometimes hardware errors, corrupting the operating system. When recovering from a system crash, the recovery system reads logs backwards and maintains undo and redo lists to determine which transactions require undoing or redoing.

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Joker 2610
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Failure Classification In DBMS

A database failure can be defined as inability of the system to provide required


functionality correctly. Database failure can be resulted due to a variety of
reasons. A failure in DBMS is categorized into the following three classifications to
ease the process of determining the exact nature of the problem:
• Transaction failure
• Disk failure
• System crash

A transaction failure happens when one or more of the operations in the


transaction cannot be completed. Examples of this include an application crash, IO
error, or insufficient disk space.
Logical errors − Where a transaction cannot complete because it has some code
error or any internal error condition.

System errors − Where the database system itself terminates an active


transaction because the DBMS is not able to execute it, or it has to stop because
of some system condition. For example, in case of deadlock or resource
unavailability, the system aborts an active transaction.

Disk failures are usually due to hardware errors with the hard disk drive itself.
These may include read/write head crashes, platter damage due to improper
handling, and power surges that can cause permanent corruption of data on the
disk.

System crashes are often caused by software bugs, but are are also sometimes
caused by hardware errors that corrupt or corrupt the operating system. Software
bugs may be due to a programming error in the database management system, a
weak SQL statement, or a misconfiguration of the DBMS system. In either case,
when there is corruption of data on disk, the system is unable to recover from this
state and is forced to enter a reboot state.

Generally, a transaction failure and disk failure are independent events and may
occur simultaneously, but only the transaction failure is reported, and this may be
further limited to a small number of transactions. A system crash, on the other
hand, can occur at any time and causes all transactions on the system to fail.
Other types of system error such as IO error can be grouped under System crash
because it causes all transactions on the system to fail with no exception.

When a system crash occurs, the system usually indicates the failure by displaying
an error message and enters a reboot state. When a disk failure occurs, however,
it does not always cause a system crash. In that case, the transaction returns an
error message or fault to the application program that attempted to access the
data on that disk. Depending on how the DBS handles this type of fault, the DBS
may return all of errors from all disks in a system or from certain disks only.
Recovery
When a system with concurrent transactions crashes and recovers, it behaves in
the following manner −

Recovery
The recovery system reads the logs backwards from the end to the last
checkpoint.

It maintains two lists, an undo-list and a redo-list.

If the recovery system sees a log with <Tn, Start> and <Tn, Commit> or just <Tn,
Commit>, it puts the transaction in the redo-list.

If the recovery system sees a log with <Tn, Start> but no commit or abort log
found, it puts the transaction in undo-list.

All the transactions in the undo-list are then undone and their logs are removed.
All the transactions in the redo-list and their previous logs are removed and then
redone before saving their logs.

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