Chapter 19

Database Recovery Techniques

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe

Chapter 19 Outline
Databases Recovery
1. Purpose of Database Recovery
2. Types of Failure
3 . Transaction Log
4 . Data Updates
5. Data Caching
6 . Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward
7 . Checkpointing
8 . Recovery schemes

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 2

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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 3

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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 4

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.
Back P and Next P point to the previous and next log
records of the same transaction.
T ID Back P Next P Operation Data item BFIM AFIM
T1 0 1 Begin
T1 1 4 Write X X = 100 X = 200
T2 0 8 Begin
T1 2 5 W Y Y = 50 Y = 100
T1 4 7 R M M = 200 M = 200
T3 0 9 R N N = 400 N = 400
T1 5 nil End
Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 5
Database Recovery
4 Data Update
 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.
 In-place update: The disk version of the data item is
overwritten by the cache version.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 6

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 Modified and Pin-
Unpin bits.
 Pin-Unpin: Instructs the operating system not to
flush the data item.
 Modified: Indicates the AFIM of the data item.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 7

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.
Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 8
Database Recovery

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Database Recovery

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

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 11

Database Recovery
Write-Ahead Logging
 When in-place update (immediate or deferred) is used

then log is necessary for recovery and it must be available

to recovery manager. 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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 12

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.

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Database Recovery
Steal/No-Steal and Force/No-Force
 Possible ways for flushing database cache to database
disk:
1. Steal: Cache can be flushed before transaction commits.
2. No-Steal: Cache cannot be flushed before transaction
commit.
3. Force: Cache is immediately flushed (forced) to disk.
4. No-Force: Cache is deferred until transaction commits
 These give rise to four different ways for handling
recovery:
 Steal/No-Force (Undo/Redo)
 Steal/Force (Undo/No-redo)
 No-Steal/No-Force (Redo/No-undo)
 No-Steal/Force (No-undo/No-redo)

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 14

Database Recovery
8 Recovery Scheme
 Deferred Update (No Undo/Redo)

 The data update goes as follows:

 A set of transactions records their updates in the
log.
 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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 15

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:
 A set of transactions records their updates in the log.
 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

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Database Recovery
Deferred Update with concurrent users
 This environment requires some concurrency control

mechanism to guarantee isolation property of

transactions. In a system recovery transactions which
were recorded in the log after the last checkpoint were
redone. The recovery manager may scan some of the
transactions recorded before the checkpoint to get the
AFIMs.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 18

Database Recovery

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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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 20

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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 21

Database Recovery
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update
 Undo/Redo Algorithm (Single-user environment)

 Use two lists of transactions maintained by the

system:
 The committed transactions since last check point
 The active transactions.
 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.
Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 22
Database Recovery
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update
 Undo/Redo Algorithm (Single-user environment)

 The recovery manager performs:

 Undo of a transaction if it is the active transactions.
 Redo of a transaction if it is the committed transactions.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 23

Database Recovery
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update
 Undo/Redo Algorithm (Concurrent execution)

 Recovery schemes of this category applies undo and also

redo to recover the database from failure.

 In concurrent execution environment a concurrency
control is required and log is maintained under WAL.
 Commit table records transactions to be committed and

active table records active transactions. To minimize the

work of the recovery manager checkpointing is used.
 The recovery performs:
 Undo of a transaction if it is in the active table.
 Redo of a transaction if it is in the commit table.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 24

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
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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.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 26

Summary
 Databases Recovery
 Types of Failure
 Transaction Log
 Data Updates
 Data Caching
 Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward
 Checkpointing

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 19- 27