Chapter 5

Database Recovery Techniques

CoSc 266 : Advanced Database management System

Instructor : Shewakena G.
Outline
Databases Recovery
1. Purpose of Database Recovery
2. Types of Failure
3. Recovery Concept
4. Transaction Log
5. Data Caching
6. Data Updates
7. Transaction Roll-back (Undo) and Roll-Forward
8. Checkpointing
9. Recovery schemes
10. ARIES Recovery Scheme
11. Recovery in Multidatabase System
Database Recovery
1 Purpose of Database Recovery
• To bring the database into the last consistent state, which
existed prior to the failure.
• To restored the database to the most recent consistent
state just before 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. Slid
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 2. Types of Failure
The database may become unavailable for use due to
 Computer/ System Failure
A hardware or software error occurs during transaction execution.
System may fail because of addressing error, application error, operating system
fault, RAM failure, etc.
 Transaction failure:
 Transactions may fail because of Some operation error such as integer overflow or division by
zero.

 Local errors or exception conditions

certain conditions necessitate cancellation of the transaction, such as insufficient
account balance in a banking database
 Concurrency control enforcement
A transactions may fail because of incorrect input, deadlock, incorrect
synchronization.

 Media failure: Disk head crash, power disruption, etc.

 Physical problems and catastrophes(sudden disaster)
3. Recovery Concept
• Recovery from database transaction failure means that the
database is restored to the most recent consistent state just
before the time of failure.
• To recover the database to its previous consistent state the
system must keep information about the change that were
applied to the data item by the various transactions.
• The information is kept in our system log file
Recovery Concept (cont.)
 Typically there are two strategies to recover the database from failure.
1. When the database on disk is not physically damaged, and a non
catastrophic failure, the recovery strategy is to identify any changes
that may cause an inconsistency in the database such as a transaction
that has updated some database items on disk but has not been
committed needs to have its changes reversed by undoing or redoing its
write operations.
2. If there is extensive damage to a wide portion of the database due to
catastrophic failure, such as a disk crash, the recovery method restores
a past copy of the database that was backed up to archival storage and
reconstructs a more current state by reapplying or redoing the
operations of committed transactions from the backed up log, up to the
time of failure
4. 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
 5 Data Caching/buffering
• Data items to be modified are first stored into database cache (main
memory buffer) by the Cache Manager (CM) and after modification
they are flushed (written) to the disk.
• If the item not in the cache, the item or disk block should be located on
disk, and then the appropriate disk pages are copied into cache.
• It may be necessary to replace or flush some of the cache buffers to make
space available for the new item.
• The flushing is controlled by Dirty/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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
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).
The UNDO-type log entries include the old value (BFIM) of the item since
this is needed to undo the effect of the operation from the log (by setting
the item value in the database back to its BFIM)
 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.
 REDO-type log entry includes the new value (AFIM) of the item written by
the operation since this is needed to redo the effect of the operation from
the log (by setting the item value in the database on disk to its AFIM)
 Steal/No-Steal and Force/No-Force
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)

 To facilitate the recovery process, the DBMS recovery subsystem may

need to maintain active transactions that have started but not committed
as yet, and it may also include lists of all committed and aborted
transactions since the last checkpoint.
8. Checkpointing
 Time to time (randomly or under some criteria) the database flushes its
buffer to database disk to minimize the task of recovery.
 The recovery manager of a DBMS must decide at what intervals to take a
checkpoint.
 The interval may be measured in time—say, every m minutes—or in the
number of committed transactions since the last checkpoint,
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.
Transaction Rollback and Cascading
Rollback
 If a transaction fails for whatever reason after updating the database, but
before the transaction commits, it may be necessary to roll back the
transaction.
 The database must be restored to their previous values (BFIMs).
 The undo-type log entries are used to restore the old values of data items
that must be rolled back.
 If a transaction T is rolled back, any transaction S that has, in the interim,
read the value of some data item X written by T must also be rolled back.
Similarly, once S is rolled back, any transaction R that has read the value of
some data item Y written by S must also be rolled back; and so on.
 This phenomenon is called cascading rollback
 Understandably, cascading rollback can be quite complex and time-
consuming. Thus not practically used
Transaction Rollback and Cascading
Rollback
Transaction Rollback and Cascading
Rollback
Roll-back: One execution of T1, T2 and T3 as recorded in the log.
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.
 REDO-type log entries are needed in the log, which include the new value
(AFIM) of the item written by a write operation. The UNDO-type log
entries are not needed

 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.
Deferred Update (No
Undo/Redo)
• 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.
 Deferred Update (No
Undo/Redo)
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.
Deferred Update (No
Undo/Redo)
Deferred Update (No
Undo/Redo)
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.
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 undone 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.
• Undo/Redo Algorithm (Single-user environment)
• 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.
Recovery Techniques Based on
Immediate Update
• 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.
• 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.
 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 Slid
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Shadow Paging (Conti.)
• 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.
Shadow Paging (Conti.)
• To recover from a failure during transaction execution, it is sufficient
to free the modified database pages and to discard the current
directory.
• The state of the database before transaction execution is available
through the shadow directory, and that state is recovered by
reinstating the shadow directory.
• The database thus is returned to its state prior to the transaction
that was executing when the crash occurred, and any modified
pages are discarded.
• Committing a transaction corresponds to discarding the previous
shadow directory.
• Since recovery involves neither undoing nor redoing data items, this
technique can be categorized as a NOUNDO/NO-REDO technique for
recovery.
The ARIES Recovery
Algorithm
 The ARIES Recovery Algorithm is based on:
 WAL (Write Ahead Logging)
 Repeating history during redo:
ARIES will retrace all actions of the database system prior to the crash
to reconstruct the database state when the crash occurred.
 Logging changes during undo:
It will prevent ARIES from repeating the completed undo operations if
a failure occurs during recovery, which causes a restart of the recovery
process.
 The ARIES recovery algorithm consists of three steps:
1. Analysis: step identifies the dirty (updated) pages in the buffer and the set
of transactions active at the time of crash. The appropriate point in the
log where redo is to start is also determined.
2. Redo: necessary redo operations are applied.
3. Undo: log is scanned backwards and the operations of transactions active
at the time of crash are undone in reverse order.
 The information needed for ARIES to accomplish its recovery procedure
includes the log, the Transaction Table, and the Dirty Page Table. Additionally,
checkpointing is used.
The ARIES Recovery
Algorithm (Conti.)
 The Log and Log Sequence Number (LSN)
 A log record is written for:
(a) data update
(b) transaction commit
(c) transaction abort
(d) undo
(e) transaction end
 In the case of undo a compensating log record is written.
 A unique LSN is associated with every log record.
LSN increases monotonically and indicates the disk address of the log
record it is associated with.
In addition, each data page stores the LSN of the latest log record
corresponding to a change for that page.
 A log record stores
(a) the previous LSN of that transaction
(b) the transaction ID
(c) the type of log record.
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm (contd.)
• The Log and Log Sequence Number (LSN) (contd.)
• A log record stores:
1. Previous LSN of that transaction: It links the log record of each
transaction. It is like a back pointer points to the previous record of
the same transaction
2. Transaction ID
3. Type of log record
• For a write operation the following additional information is logged:
1. Page ID for the page that includes the item
2. Length of the updated item
3. Its offset from the beginning of the page
4. BFIM of the item
5. AFIM of the item
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm
(contd.)
 The Transaction table and the Dirty Page table
 For efficient recovery following tables are also stored in the log during
checkpointing:
Transaction table: Contains an entry for each active transaction, with
information such as transaction ID, transaction status and the LSN of the most
recent log record for the transaction.
Dirty Page table: Contains an entry for each dirty page in the buffer, which
includes the page ID and the LSN corresponding to the earliest update to that
page.
 Checkpointing
 A checkpointing does the following:
Writes a begin_checkpoint record in the log
Writes an end_checkpoint record in the log. With this record the
contents of transaction table and dirty page table are appended to the
end of the log.
Writes the LSN of the begin_checkpoint record to a special file. This
special file is accessed during recovery to locate the last checkpoint
information.
 To reduce the cost of checkpointing and allow the system to continue to
execute transactions, ARIES uses “fuzzy checkpointing”.
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm (contd.)
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm (contd.)
• The following steps are performed for recovery
• Analysis phase: Start at the begin_checkpoint record and proceed to
the end_checkpoint record. Access transaction table and dirty page
table are appended to the end of the log. Note that during this
phase some other log records may be written to the log and
transaction table may be modified. The analysis phase compiles the
set of redo and undo to be performed and ends.
• Redo phase: Starts from the point in the log up to where all dirty
pages have been flushed, and move forward to the end of the log.
Any change that appears in the dirty page table is redone.
• Undo phase: Starts from the end of the log and proceeds backward
while performing appropriate undo. For each undo it writes a
compensating record in the log.
• The recovery completes at the end of undo phase.
The ARIES Recovery Algorithm (contd.)
Recovery in multidatabase system
10 Recovery 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.
• 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.
End of Chapter 5
Thank You!