Chapter Three

Database Recovery Techniques

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Databases Recovery
1. Recovery Concepts
I. Types of Failure
II. Transaction Log
III. Write a head Log
IV. Data Caching
V. Checkpointing
VI. Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward
2. Data Update & Recovery Schema

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 Transaction Manager : Accepts transaction commands from an application, which
tell the transaction manager when transactions begin and end,
as well as information about the expectations of the
application.
The transaction processor performs the following tasks:
Transaction Request  Logging: In order to assure
durability, every change in the
Query Transaction Log database is logged separately on
Processor Manager Manager disk.

 Log manager initially writes the

Buffer Recovery log in buffers and negotiates with
Manager Manager the buffer manager to make sure
that buffers are written to disk at
appropriate times.
Data
 Recovery Manager: will be able
------------
Log to examine the log of changes and
restore the database to some
consistent state. 3
1. Recovery Concept
i. Purpose of Database Recovery
– To bring the database into the last consistent state, which existed
prior to the failure.
– To preserve transaction properties (Atomicity &and Durability).
• The recovery manager of a DBMS is responsible to ensure
– atomicity by undoing the action of transaction that do
not commit
– Durability by making sure that all actions of committed
transaction survive system crash
ii. Types of Failure
– The database may become unavailable for use due to :
• Transaction failure: Transactions may fail because of
incorrect input, deadlock.
• 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. 4
 To recover from system failure , the system keeps information
about the change in the system log
 Strategy for recovery may be summarized as :
 Recovery from catastrophic
 If there is extensive damage to the wide portion of the
database
 This method restore a past copy of the database from the
backup storage and reconstructs operation of a committed
transaction from the back up log up to the time of failure
 Recovery from non-catastrophic failure
 When the database is not physically damaged but has be
come in consistent
 The strategy uses undoing and redoing some operations
in order to restore to a consistent state : example
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 For instance,
– If failure occurs between commit and database buffers
being flushed to secondary storage then, to ensure
durability, recovery manager has to redo (roll forward)
transaction’s updates.
– If transaction had not committed at failure time, recovery
manager has to undo (rollback) any effects of that
transaction for atomicity. Example,
Fig 2 :
status of
transactions
at the time
of system
fails
– DBMS starts at time t0, but fails at time tf.
– T1 and T6 have to be undone. In absence of any other
information, recovery manager has to redo T2, T3, T4, and T5. 6
iii. 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 (appended file) called Transaction log
– These log files becomes very useful in brining back the
system to a stable state after a system crash.
– 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
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IV. 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
 When DBMS request for read /write operation on some item
 It check the requested data item is in the cache or not
 If it is not, the appropriate disk block are copied to the
cache
 If the cache is already full, some buffer replacement
policy can be used . Like
 Least recent used (LRU)
 FIFO
 While replacing buffers , first of all the updated value on
that buffer should be saved on the appropriate block in
the data base
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V. Write-Ahead Logging
 When in-place update (immediate or deferred) is used
then log is necessary for recovery
 This log 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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 Standard Recovery Terminology
 Possible ways for flushing database cache to database disk:
i. No-Steal: Cache cannot be flushed before transaction commit.
ii. Steal: Cache can be flushed before transaction commits.
Advantage:
 it avoids the need for a very large buffer space to store
all updated pages in the memory
iii. Force: if all Cache updates are immediately flushed (forced) to
disk when a transaction commits----- force writing
iv. No-Force: if Cached are flushed to a disk when the need arise
after a committed transaction
Advantage:
 an updated pages of a committed transaction may still be
in the buffer when an other transaction needs to update
 If this page is updated by multiple transaction, it
eliminates the I/O cost to read that page again ,
 These give rise to four different ways for handling recovery:
• Steal/No-Force (Undo/Redo)
• Steal/Force (Undo/No-redo)
• No-Steal/No-Force (No-undo/Redo)
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• No-Steal/Force (No-undo/No-redo)
VI. Checkpointing
 Log file is used to recover failed DB but we may not know how far back
in the log to search. Thus
 Checkpoint is a Point of synchronization between database and log file.
 Time to time (randomly or under some criteria) the database flushes its
buffer to database disk to minimize the task of recovery.
 When failure occurs, redo all transactions that committed since the
checkpoint and undo all transactions active at time of crash.
 In previous example ,Figure 2, on slide 6 , with checkpoint at time tc,
changes made by T2 and T3 have been written to secondary storage.
Thus: only redo T4 and T5, undo transactions T1 and T6.
 At what interval to take a check pointing may be measured :
 In terms of time , say m minutes after the last check point
 The # t of committed transaction since the last check point
 The following steps defines a checkpoint operation:
i. Suspend execution of transactions temporarily.
ii. Force write modified buffer data to disk.
iii. Write a [checkpoint] record to the log, save the log to disk.
iv. Resume normal transaction execution. 11
VII. Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward (Redo)
 If transaction fails for what so ever reason after updating
the data base it must be necessary to roll back
 IF a transaction T is roll back , any transaction , S, that has
read the value of some data item X written by T must be
also be roll back
 Similarly once S is roll back, any transaction R that has
read the values of some data item Y written by S must aslo
be roll back, and so on..
 To maintain such cases, 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. 12
Example

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

Remark:
• Only write item operation need to be undone during transaction roll back
• Read item operations are recorded in the log only to determine whether
cascading roll back of additional transaction is needed
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2. Data Update and Recovery Scheme : Three types
i. 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.
 No undo is required because no AFIM is flushed to the disk before a
transaction commits.
 After reboot from a failure the log is used to redo all the transactions
affected by this failure.
– Limitation: out of buffer space may be happened because transaction
changes must be held in the cache buffer until the commit point
– Type of deferred updated recovery environment
 Single User and Multiple user environment
a) 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
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database disk.
 2: Write
Update data

1
LOG File

COMMIT
4

Database
•Example: Differed Update for single user

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 b) 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.

T4 and T5 are ignored because they didn’t reach their commit points
T2 and T3 are redone because their commit point is after the last
checkpoint
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 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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ii. 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.

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iii. Shadow Paging
 This technique does not require LOG in single user environment
 Maintain two page tables during life of a transaction: current page
and shadow page table.
 When transaction starts, two pages are the same.
 Shadow page table is never changed thereafter and is used to restore
database in event of failure.
 During transaction, current page table records all updates to
database.
 When transaction completes, current page table becomes shadow
page table.

X Y
X' Y'

Database

X and Y: Shadow copies of data items

X' and Y': Current copies of data items 21
 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.

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