Book Description

"The declining cost of main memory coupled with higher performance expectations has inspired researchers and developers to look into systems with massive amounts of memory, especially for systems with databases. When memory is large enough, an entire database can permanently reside in main memory. These database systems are known as memory resident database or Main Memory DataBase (MMDB) systems. When a database is a main memory resident, systems can achieve significant performance improvements over traditional disk-based database systems by eliminating the overhead required to perform Input/Output operations. However, the problem of crash recovery becomes by far the most challenging issue in MMDB systems, since it can occur frequently and cause a drastic crisis by wiping out the entire content of the database. The kind of crisis that can be encountered due to memory failures, the way to prevent them from occuring in the first place, methods of dealing with them upon their occurance, strategies to make the system more reliable to avoid them in the future, and several other issues like these must be well understood. Approaches to deal with crash recoveries must be sound, well designed, and correctly implemented. The objective of this thesis is to study some of the pioneering works of researchers and developers in the area of MMDB recovery and to perform an in-depth analysis of MMDB recovery issues and approaches taken by several major recovery techniques. The analysis examines the reasons for these techniques, design and architecture, and their benefits and limitations over one another. My independent evaluation of the relative benefits and limitations of each technique coupled with marketablitiy analysis is also presented. The approach used in this study is different from that of other studies that have been published so far in this area. In this study, the reader is given a basic introduction to the topic and then gradually taken through the final stages of analysis and comparison of several recovery techniques."--Author's abstract.