Advanced Database Systems

Chapter Four

Database Recovery Techniques

Outline
Outline
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(Redo)
7.Checkpointing
8.Recovery schemes
9.Recovery in Multidatabase System 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.
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Database Recovery(Cont.…)
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.
• Concurrency control enforcements(e.g. deadlock)
• Local errors or exceptions
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Database
DatabaseRecovery
Recovery(Cont.…)
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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DatabaseRecovery
Database Recovery(Cont.…)
4 Data Update
– Immediate Update: As soon as a data item is modified in cache, the
disk copy is updated.
-Allows updates of an uncommitted transaction to be made to the
buffer, or the disk itself, before the transaction commits
– 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.
o performs updates to buffer/disk only at the time of transaction
commit.
- Simplifies some aspects of recovery
- But has overhead of storing local copy
– 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. 6
Database Recovery
Recovery(Cont.…)
5 Data Caching
– Data items to be modified are first stored into database
cache by the Cache Manager (CM).
– After modification, they are flushed (written) to the
disk.
– The flushing is controlled by dirty and Pin-Unpin
bits.
• Dirty bits=1: Indicates that the data item is
modified.
• Pin-Unpin bits: a page in cache is pinned (bit
value=1) if it can not be written back to disk as yet.
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Database Recovery
Recovery(Cont.…)
Steal/No-Steal and Force/No-Force recovery protocol
– Possible ways for flushing database cache to database disk:
1. Steal: Cache can be flushed before transaction commits.
o It avoids the need for a very large buffer space to store updated
pages in memory
2. No-Steal: Cache cannot be flushed before transaction commit.
3. Force: pages updated by a transaction are immediately written to
disk before the transaction commits.
- REDO will never be needed during recovery.
4. No-Force: An updated page of a committed transaction may still be
in the buffer when another transaction needs to update it
- This eliminate the I/O cost to read that page again from disk
– These give rise to four different ways for handling recovery:
• Steal/Force (Undo/No-redo)
• Steal/No-Force (Undo/Redo)
• No-Steal/No-Force (No-undo/Redo)
• No-Steal/Force (No-undo/No-redo) 8
Database Recovery(Cont.…)
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.
• Undo and Redo of Transactions
– undo(Ti) restores the value of all data items updated by Ti to their
old values, going backwards from the last log record for Ti
o each time a data item X is restored to its old value V a special log record
<Ti , X,V> is written out.
o when undo of a transaction is complete, a log record <Ti abort> is
written out.
– redo(Ti) sets the value of all data items updated by Ti to the new
values, going forward from the first log record for T
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Undo and Redo on Recovering from Failure
• When recovering after failure:
o TransactionTi needs to be undone if the log
▪ Contains the record <Ti start>,
▪ but does not contain either the record <Ti commit> or <Ti
abort>.
o TransactionTi needs to be redone if the log
▪ Ccontains the records <Ti start>
▪ and contains the record <Ti commit> or <Ti abort>
• Note that If transaction Ti was undone earlier and the <Ti abort> record
written to the log, and then a failure occurs, on recovery from failure Ti is
redone.
o Such a redo redoes all the original actions including the steps that
restored old values
▪ Known as repeating history.
▪ Seems wasteful, but simplifies recovery greatly. 10
Immediate DB Modification Recovery Example
Below we show the log as it appears at three instances of time.

Recovery actions in each case above are:

(a) undo (T0): B is restored to 2000 and A to 1000, and log records
<T0, B, 2000>, <T0, A, 1000>, <T0, abort> are written out
(b) redo (T0) and undo (T1): A and B are set to 950 and 2050 and C is
restored to 700. Log records <T1, C, 700>, <T1, abort> are
written out.
(c) redo (T0) and redo (T1): A and B are set to 950 and 2050
respectively. Then C is set to 600
Database Recovery(Cont.…)

The read and write operations of three transactions

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Database
Database Recovery(Cont.…)
Recovery

System log at the time of crash 13

Database Recovery(Cont.…)
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.
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DatabaseRecovery
Database Recovery(Cont.…)
7 Checkpointing
• Redoing/undoing all transactions recorded in the log can be very slow
o Processing the entire log is time-consuming if the system has run for a long time.
o We might unnecessarily redo transactions which have already output their updates to the
database.
– 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.
• During recovery we need to consider only the most recent transaction Ti that
started before the checkpoint, and transactions that started after Ti.
• Transactions that committed or aborted before the checkpoint already have all
their updates output to stable storage. 15
Example of Checkpoints
Tc Tf
T1
T2
T3
T4

Checkpoint System failure

o T1 can be ignored (updates already output to disk due to

checkpoint)
oT2 and T3 redone.
oT4 undone
Checkpoints example 2

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Database Recovery(Cont.…)
8 Recovery Scheme
• For Deferred Update (No Undo/Redo)
– The data update goes as follows:
• A set of transactions record 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(Cont.…)

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 Recovery(Cont.…)
Database Recovery
Deferred Update with concurrent users
• This environment requires some concurrency control mechanism
to guarantee isolation property of transactions. In the 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.

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Database Recovery
Database Recovery(Cont.…)

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Database Recovery(Cont.…)
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.
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Database Recovery(Cont.…)
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.

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Database Recovery(Cont.…)
Recovery Techniques Based on Immediate Update
– Undo/Redo Algorithm
• 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:
–Undo of a transaction if it is in the active table.
–Redo of a transaction if it is in the commit table.
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Database Recovery
Recovery(Cont.…)
Shadow Paging
• This recovery scheme does not require the use of a log in a
single user environment.
• 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(Cont.…)
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.

An example of shadow paging 26

RecoveryRecovery
Database in multidatabase system
• A multidatabase 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 Windows and so
on.
• Databases may even be stored on different types of DBMSs; for
example, some DBMSs may be relational, whereas others are object-
oriented, hierarchical, or network DBMSs.

• 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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Recovery in multidatabase system(cont.…)
• To maintain the atomicity of multidatabase transaction(MDT) , it is
necessary to have a two level recovery mechanism.
• A global recovery manager or coordinator is needed to maintain
information needed for recovery
• The coordinator usually follows a Two-phase commit protocol which
can be explained as follows:
• Phase1: when all participating databases signal the coordinator that the
part of the MDT involving each has concluded, the coordinator sends a
“prepare for commit” message to each participant to get ready for
committing the transaction
– Each participating DB receiving that message will force write log
records to disk and send “ready to commit” or “OK” signal to the
coordinator .
– If the coordinator does not receive reply from a DB within certain
time out interval, it assumes a “not ok” response 28
Recovery in multidatabase system(cont…)
• Phase 2: If all participating databases reply ok, the transaction
is successful and the coordinator sends a commit signal to
the participating DBs
– Because all the local effects of the transaction and
information needed for local recovery is recorded in the
logs of participating DBs, recovery from failure is now
possible.
– Each participating DB completes transaction commit by
writing a [commit] for the transaction in the log
– If one or more of the participating DB or the coordinator
have a “not OK” response, the T has failed and the
coordinator sends a message to rollback or Undo the local
effect of the transaction to each participating DB.
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 Exercise

• Consider the log records shown on the next slide

by transactions T1, T2, T3 and T4 with initial values
of B=15, C=50, D=40 and E=25. Using deferred
update, show the final values of B, C, D and E after
recovery from failure if the crash occurred after the
indicated point.
o Which transactions are rolled back?
o Which operations in the log are redone and
which (if any) are undone?
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 Continued …
[Start_transaction,T1]
Initial values
[write_item,T1,B,12]
B C D E
[write_item,T1,D,10]
15 50 40 25
[commit T1]
[checkpoint]
Final values after recovery
[Start_transaction,T3]
[write_item,T3,E,30] B C D E
[commit T3] 18 50 10 30
[Start_transaction,T4]
[write_item,T4,B,18]
[commit T4]
[Start_transaction,T2]
[write_item,T2,C,28] Crash 31
Database Recovery from Catastrophic Failures
• All the techniques we have discussed apply to
noncatastrophic failures.
• The system log(or the shadow directory) is maintained on
the disk and is not lost as a result of the failure.
• The recovery manager of a DBMS must also be equipped
to handle more catastrophic failures such as disk crashes.
• The main technique used to handle such crashes is a
database backup.

Read More about Recovery from Catastrophic Failures?

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