Advanced DB - Ch.

Chapter 5
Database Recovery
Techniques

Database Recovery
1 Purpose of Database Recovery
• To bring the database into the last consistent
state, which existed prior to the failure.
• To preserve transaction properties (Atomicity,
Consistency, Isolation and Durability).
Example: If the system crashes before a fund
transfer transaction completes its execution, then
either one or both accounts may have incorrect
value. Thus, the database must be restored to the
state before the transaction modified any of the
accounts.

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Database Recovery
2 Types of Failure
The database may become unavailable for use due to
• Transaction failure: Transactions may fail because of
incorrect input, deadlock, incorrect synchronization.
• System failure: System may fail because of addressing
error, application error, operating system fault, RAM
failure, etc.
• Media failure: Disk head crash, power disruption, etc.

Database Recovery
3 Transaction Log
For recovery from any type of failure data values prior to
modification (BFIM - BeFore IMage) and the new value after
modification (AFIM – AFter IMage) are required. These values
and other information is stored in a sequential file called
Transaction log. A sample log is given below.

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Database Recovery
4 Data Update
 In-place update: The disk version of the data item is
overwritten by the cache version.
• Immediate Update: As soon as a data item is
modified in cache, the disk copy is updated.
• Deferred Update: All modified data items in the
cache is written either after a transaction ends its
execution or after a fixed number of transactions
have completed their execution.
 Shadow update: The modified version of a data item
does not overwrite its disk copy but is written at a
separate disk location. BFIM and the AFIM can be kept
on disk; hence, it is not strictly necessary to maintain a
log.

Database Recovery
5. Data Caching
Data items to be modified are first stored into database cache by
the Cache Manager (CM) and after modification, they are
flushed (written) to the disk. The flushing is controlled by dirty
and Pin-Unpin bits.
• Dirty bits: Indicates whether or not the buffer has been
modified. 0, when a page is first read from the database
disk into a cache buffer. Data are flushed (written) to
the disk only if its dirty bit is 1.
• Pin-Unpin bits: a page in cache is pinned (bit value=1)
if it cannot yet be written back to disk. Instructs the
operating system not to flush the data item.

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Database Recovery
6 Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward (Redo)
To maintain atomicity, a transaction’s operations are redone
or undone.
Undo: Restore all BFIMs on to disk (Remove all AFIMs).
Redo: Restore all AFIMs on to disk.
Database recovery is achieved either by performing only
Undos or only Redos or by a combination of the two. These
operations are recorded in the log as they happen.

Database Recovery
Roll-back

We show the process of roll-back with the help of the following

three transactions T1, and T2 and T3.

T1 T2 T3
read_item (A) read_item (B) read_item (C)
read_item (D) write_item (B) write_item (B)
write_item (D) read_item (D) read_item (A)
write_item (A) write_item (A)

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Database Recovery
Roll-back: One execution of T1, T2 and T3 as recorded in the log.

T3 READ(C) WRITE(B) READ(A)

BEGIN READ(B) WRITE(B) READ(D) WRITE(D)
T2
BEGIN READ(A) READ(D) WRITE(D)
T1
BEGIN
Time
system crash

Illustrating cascading roll-back

Database Recovery
Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)
When in-place update (immediate or deferred) is used, then log is
necessary for recovery. This is achieved by Write-Ahead Logging
(WAL) protocol. WAL states that:
For Undo: Before a data item’s AFIM is flushed to the database
disk (overwriting the BFIM) its BFIM must be written to the log
and the log must be saved on a stable store (log disk).
For Redo: Before a transaction executes its commit operation,
all its AFIMs must be written to the log and the log must be
saved on a stable store.

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Database Recovery
7 Checkpointing
Time to time (randomly or under some criteria) the database flushes
its buffer to database disk to minimize the task of recovery. The
following steps defines a checkpoint operation:
1. Suspend execution of transactions temporarily.
2. Force-write modified buffer data to disk.
3. Write a [checkpoint] record to the log, save the log to disk.
4. Resume normal transaction execution.
During recovery redo or undo is required to transactions appearing
after [checkpoint] record.
Transactions with [commit, T] entries in the log before a
[checkpoint] entry do not need to have their WRITE operations
redone in case of a system crash, since all their updates will be
recorded in the database on disk during checkpointing.

Database Recovery
8 Recovery Scheme
Deferred Update (No Undo/Redo)
The data update goes as follows:
1. A set of transactions records their updates in the log.
2. At commit point under WAL scheme, these updates are
saved on database disk.
After reboot from a failure the log is used to redo all the
transactions affected by this failure. No undo is required because
no AFIM is flushed to the disk before a transaction commits.

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Database Recovery
Deferred Update in a single-user system

There is no concurrent data sharing in a single user system. The

data update goes as follows:
1. A set of transactions records their updates in the log.
2. At commit point under updates are saved on database disk.
After reboot from a failure the log is used to redo all the
transactions affected by this failure. No undo is required because
no AFIM is flushed to the disk before a transaction commits.

Database Recovery
Deferred Update with concurrent users
Two tables are required for implementing this protocol:

Active table: All active transactions are entered in this table.

Commit table: Transactions to be committed are entered in this table.

During recovery, all transactions of the commit table are redone and all
transactions of active tables are ignored since none of their AFIMs
reached the database. It is possible that a commit table transaction may
be redone twice but this does not create any inconsistency because of a
redone is “idempotent”, that is, one redone for an AFIM is equivalent to
multiple redone for the same AFIM.

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Database Recovery
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update

Undo/No-redo Algorithm

In this algorithm AFIMs of a transaction are flushed to the database disk

under WAL before it commits. For this reason the recovery manager
undoes all transactions during recovery.
No transaction is redone. It is possible that a transaction might have
completed execution and ready to commit but this transaction is also
undone.

Database Recovery
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update

Undo/Redo Algorithm (Single-user environment)

Recovery schemes of this category apply undo and also redo for
recovery. In a single-user environment no concurrency control is
required but a log is maintained under WAL.
Note that at any time there will be one transaction in the system and it
will be either in the commit table or in the active table. The recovery
manager performs:

1. Undo of a transaction if it is in the active table.

2. Redo of a transaction if it is in the commit table.

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Database Recovery
Shadow Paging
The AFIM does not overwrite its BFIM but recorded at another place on
the disk. Thus, at any time a data item has AFIM and BFIM (Shadow
copy of the data item) at two different places on the disk.

X Y
X' Y'

Database

X and Y: Shadow copies of data items

X` and Y`: Current copies of data items

Database Recovery
Shadow Paging
To manage access of data items by concurrent transactions two
directories (current and shadow) are used. The directory arrangement is
illustrated below. Here a page is a data item.
Current Directory Shadow Directory
(after updating pages 2, 5) (not updated)
Page 5 (old)
1 Page 1 1
2 Page 4 2
3 Page 2 (old) 3
4 Page 3 4
5 Page 6 5
6 Page 2 (new) 6
Page 5 (new)

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Database Recovery
9 The ARIES Recovery Algorithm
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm is based on:

1. WAL (Write Ahead Logging)

2. Repeating history during redo: ARIES will retrace all actions of
the database system prior to the crash to reconstruct the database
state when the crash occurred.
3. Logging changes during undo: It will prevent ARIES from
repeating the completed undo operations if a failure occurs
during recovery, which causes a restart of the recovery process.

Database Recovery
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm

The ARIES recovery algorithm consists of three steps:

1. Analysis: step identifies the dirty (updated) pages in the buffer

and the set of transactions active at the time of crash. The
appropriate point in the log where redo is to start is also
determined.
2. Redo: necessary redo operations are applied.
3. Undo: log is scanned backwards and the operations of
transactions active at the time of crash are undone in reverse
order.

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Database Recovery
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm
Checkpointing
A checkpointing does the following:

1. Writes a begin_checkpoint record in the log

2. Writes an end_checkpoint record in the log. With this record the
contents of transaction table and dirty page table are appended to
the end of the log.
3. Writes the LSN of the begin_checkpoint record to a special file.
This special file is accessed during recovery to locate the last
checkpoint information.

To reduce the cost of checkpointing and allow the system to

continue to execute transactions, ARIES uses “fuzzy
checkpointing”.

Database Recovery
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm
The following steps are performed for recovery
1. Analysis phase: Start at the begin_checkpoint record and
proceed to the end_checkpoint record. Access transaction table
and dirty page table are appended to the end of the log. Note that
during this phase some other log records may be written to the
log and transaction table may be modified. The analysis phase
compiles the set of redo and undo to be performed and ends.
2. Redo phase: Starts from the point in the log up to where all dirty
pages have been flushed, and move forward to the end of the log.
Any change that appears in the dirty page table is redone.
3. Undo phase: Starts from the end of the log and proceeds
backward while performing appropriate undo. For each undo it
writes a compensating record in the log.
The recovery completes at the end of undo phase.

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Database Recovery
10 Recovery in multi-database system
A multi-database system is a special distributed database
system where one node may be running relational database
system under Unix, another may be running object-oriented
system under window and so on. A transaction may run in a
distributed fashion at multiple nodes. In this execution
scenario the transaction commits only when all these multiple
nodes agree to commit individually the part of the transaction
they were executing.

This commit scheme is referred to as “two-phase commit”

(2PC). If any one of these nodes fails or cannot commit the
part of the transaction, then the transaction is aborted. Each
node recovers the transaction under its own recovery protocol.

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