Backup and Recovery Techniques Need for Recovery:

Whenever a transaction is submitted to a DBMS for execution, the system is responsible for making sure that either: All the operations in the transaction are completed successfully and their effect is recorded permanently in the database or; The transaction has no effect whatsoever on the database or on any other transactions. The DBMS must not permit some operations of a transaction T to be applied to the database while other operations of T are not. This may happen if a transaction fails after executing some of its operations but before executing all of them.

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Types of Failures:
There are several possible reasons for a transaction
to fail in the middle of the execution. They are:

1. A computer failure (system crash):

A hardware, software, or network error occurs in the

computer system during transaction execution.

Hardware crashes are usually media failures like

main memory failure.

2. A transaction or system error:

Some operation in the transaction may cause it to fail,
such as integer overflow or division by zero.

Transaction

failure

may

also

occur

because

of

erroneous parameter values or because of a logical programming error. In addition the user may interrupt the transaction during its execution.

3. Local errors or exception conditions detected by the transaction:

During transaction execution, certain conditions may occur that necessitate cancellation of the transaction. For e.g. data for the transaction may not be found. Notice that an exception condition, such as insufficient account balance in a banking database may cause a transaction, such as money withdrawal to be cancelled.

This should be programmed in the transaction itself and

hence would not be considered a failure.

4. Concurrency control enforcement:

The concurrency method may decide to abort the transaction, to be restarted later, because it violates serializability or because several transaction are in a state of deadlock.

5. Disk Failure:
Some disk blocks may lose their data because of a read or write malfunction or because of a disk read/write head crash. This may happen during a read or a write operation of the transaction.

6. Physical problems and catastrophes:

This refers to an endless list of problems that includes
power or air conditioning failure, fire, theft, sabotage,

overwriting disks or tapes by mistake and mounting of a

wrong tape by the operator.

Recovery Algorithms:
Recovery algorithms are techniques to ensure database consistency and transaction atomicity and durability despite failures.
Recovery algorithms have two parts: 1.Actions taken during normal transaction processing to ensure enough information exists to recover from failures. 2.Actions taken after a failure to recover the database contents to a state that ensures atomicity, consistency and durability.

Storage Structure: Volatile storage:

Information residing in volatile storage does not usually survive system crashes. examples: main memory, cache memory. Access to volatile storage is extremely fast.

Nonvolatile storage:
Information residing in non volatile storage survives system crashes. examples: disk, tape, flash memory, non-volatile (battery backed up) RAM .

Stable storage:
a mythical form of storage that survives all failures. approximated by maintaining multiple copies on distinct nonvolatile media.

Stable-Storage Implementation:
Stable storage maintains multiple copies of each block on separate disks. Copies can be at remote sites to protect against disasters such as

fire or flooding.
Failure during data transfer can result in inconsistent copies. Block transfer can result in:

Successful completion.
Partial failure: destination block has incorrect information. Total failure: destination block was never updated.

 One solution for protecting storage media from failure during data transfer is to execute output operation as follows (assuming two copies of each block): 1.Write the information onto the first physical block. 2.When the first write successfully completes, write the same information onto the second physical block. 3.The output is completed only after the second write successfully completes.

Copies of a block may differ due to failure during output operation. To recover from failure: 1. First find inconsistent blocks: 1. Expensive solution: Compare the two copies of every disk block. 2. Better solution:

Record in-progress disk writes on non-volatile storage (Non-volatile RAM or special area of disk).

Use this information during recovery to find blocks that may be inconsistent, and only compare copies of these.

2. If either copy of an inconsistent block is detected to have an error (bad checksum), overwrite it by the other copy. If both have no error, but are different, overwrite the second block by the first block.

Data Access:

Physical blocks are those blocks residing on the disk.

Buffer blocks are the blocks residing temporarily in main memory.

Block movements between disk and main memory are initiated through the following two operations:
input(B) transfers the physical block B to main memory. output(B) transfers the buffer block B to the disk, and replaces the appropriate physical block there.

 Each transaction Ti has its private work-area in which local copies of all data items accessed and updated by it are kept. Ti's local copy of a data item X is called xi. We assume, for simplicity, that each data item fits in, and is stored inside, a single block.

 Transaction transfers data items between system buffer blocks and its private work-area using the following operations : read(X) assigns the value of data item X to the local variable xi. write(X) assigns the value of local variable xi to data item {X} in the buffer block. both these commands may necessitate the issue of an input(BX) instruction before the assignment, if the block BX in which X resides is not already in memory. Transactions: Perform read(X) while accessing X for the first time; All subsequent accesses are to the local copy. After last access, transaction executes write(X). output(BX) need not immediately follow write(X). System can perform the output operation when it deems fit.

Example of Data Access

buffer Buffer Block A Buffer Block B read(X) write(Y) x2
X Y

input(A) A B

output(B)

x1 y1 work area of T1

work area of T2 memory

disk

Recovery and Atomicity

Modifying the database without ensuring that the transaction will commit may leave the database in an inconsistent state. Consider transaction Ti that transfers Rs.50 from account A to account B; goal is either to perform all database modifications made by Ti or none at all. Several output operations may be required for Ti (to output A and B). A failure may occur after one of these modifications have been made but before all of them are made.

 To ensure atomicity despite failures, we first output information describing the modifications to stable storage without modifying the database itself. There are two approaches: log-based recovery, and shadow-paging

We assume (initially) that transactions run serially, that is, one after the other.

Log-Based Recovery:
A log is kept on stable storage.
The log is a sequence of log records, and

maintains a record of update activities on the

database.

There are several types of log records.

An update log record describes a single database

write, and has the following fields:

 When transaction Ti starts, it registers itself by writing a <Ti start>log record. Before Ti executes write(X), a log record <Ti, X, V1, V2> is written, where V1 is the value of X before the write, and V2 is the value to be written to X. Log record notes that Ti has performed a write on data item Xj Xj had value V1 before the write, and will have value V2 after the write. When Ti finishes it last statement, the log record <Ti commit> is written.

 Two approaches using logs: Deferred database modification Immediate database modification

Deferred database modification:

The idea behind deferred update technique is to defer or postpone any actual updates to the database until the transaction completes its execution successfully and reaches its commit point.
During transaction execution, the updates are recorded only in the log and in cache buffers,

After the transaction reaches its commit point and the log is written to the disk, the updates are recorded in the database.
If a transaction fails before reaching its commit point there is

no need to undo any operation because the transaction has not effected the database in any way.

 This is implemental only if transactions are short and each

transaction changes few items.

For other types of transactions , there is potential for running out of buffer space because transaction changes must be

held in the cache buffers until the commit point.

We can state a typical deferred update protocol as follows: 1. A transaction cannot change the database on disk until it reaches its commit point. 2. A transaction does not reach its commit point until all its update operations are recorded in the log and the log is written to disk.

 With this protocol the database is never updated on disk until after the transaction commits, there is never a need to UNDO any operations. Hence this is known as NO UNDO/REDO recovery algorithm. REDO is needed in case the system fails after a transaction commits but before all its changes are recorded in the database on disk. In this case, the transaction operations are redone from the log entries.

Immediate database modification:

In these techniques, when a transaction issues an update command, the database can be updated immediately, without any need to wait for the transaction to reach its

commit point.
In these techniques, however , an update operation must still be recorded in the log (on disk) before it is applied to the

database.
Provisions must be made for undoing the effect of update operations that has been applied to the database by a failed

transaction.
This is done by rolling back the transaction and undoing the effect of the transactions write_operations.

 Theoretically we can distinguish two main categories of

immediate update algorithms:

If the recovery technique ensures that all updates of a transaction are recorded in the database on the disk before

transaction commits, there is never a need to REDO any operations of the committed transactions
This is called the UNDO/NO-REDO recovery algorithm.

On the other hand if the transaction is allowed to commit before all its changes are written to the database, we have the most general case, known as the UNDO/REDO recovery algorithm.

Checkpoints:
Problems in recovery procedure are : 1. searching the entire log is time-consuming. 2. we might unnecessarily redo transactions which have already. 3. output their updates to the database. Streamline recovery procedure by periodically performing checkpointing. 1. Output all log records currently residing in main memory onto stable storage. 2. Output all modified buffer blocks to the disk. 3. Write a log record < checkpoint> onto stable storage.

 During recovery we need to consider only the most recent transaction Ti that started before the checkpoint, and transactions that started after Ti. 1. Scan backwards from end of log to find the most recent <checkpoint> record . 2. Continue scanning backwards till a record <Ti start> is found. 3. Need only consider the part of log following above start record. Earlier part of log can be ignored during recovery, and can be erased whenever desired. 4. For all transactions (starting from Ti or later) with no <Ti commit>, execute undo(Ti). (Done only in case of immediate modification.) 5. Scanning forward in the log, for all transactions starting from Ti or later with a <Ti commit>, execute redo(Ti).

Example of Checkpoints:
Tc T1 T2 T3 T4 system failure Tf

checkpoint

T1 can be ignored (updates already output to disk due to checkpoint) T2 and T3 redone. T4 undone

Shadow Paging: Shadow paging is an alternative to log-based recovery; this scheme is useful if transactions execute serially. Idea: maintain two page tables during the lifetime of a transaction the current page table, and the shadow page table. Store the shadow page table in nonvolatile storage, such that state of the database prior to transaction execution may be recovered. Shadow page table is never modified during execution To start with, both the page tables are identical. Only current page table is used for data item accesses during execution of the transaction. Whenever any page is about to be written for the first time A copy of this page is made onto an unused page. The current page table is then made to point to the copy The update is performed on the copy

Sample Page Table

Example of Shadow Paging

Shadow and current page tables after write to page 4 .

 To commit a transaction : 1. Flush all modified pages in main memory to disk 2. Output current page table to disk 3. Make the current page table the new shadow page table, as follows: keep a pointer to the shadow page table at a fixed (known) location on disk. to make the current page table the new shadow page table, simply update the pointer to point to current page table on disk Once pointer to shadow page table has been written, transaction is committed. No recovery is needed after a crash new transactions can start right away, using the shadow page table. Pages not pointed to from current/shadow page table should be freed (garbage collected).

 Advantages of shadow-paging over log-based schemes: no overhead of writing log records recovery is trivial Disadvantages : Copying the entire page table is very expensive Can be reduced by using a page table structured like a B+tree. No need to copy entire tree, only need to copy paths in the tree that lead to updated leaf nodes Commit overhead is high even with above extension. Need to flush every updated page, and page table. Data gets fragmented (related pages get separated on disk). After every transaction completion, the database pages containing old versions of modified data need to be garbage collected. Hard to extend algorithm to allow transactions to run concurrently. Easier to extend log based schemes.

Failure with Loss of Nonvolatile Storage:

So far we assumed no loss of non-volatile storage Technique similar to checkpointing used to deal with loss of non-volatile storage Periodically dump the entire content of the database to stable storage No transaction may be active during the dump procedure; a procedure similar to checkpointing must take place Output all log records currently residing in main memory onto stable storage. Output all buffer blocks onto the disk. Copy the contents of the database to stable storage. Output a record <dump> to log on stable storage.

 To recover from disk failure: restore database from most recent dump. Consult the log and redo all transactions that committed after the dump. Can be extended to allow transactions to be active during dump known as fuzzy dump or online dump.