Database recovery using incomplete page versions in a multisystem data sharing environment

Abstract

Coupling multiple computing nodes for transaction processing for the sake of capacity and availability has received considerable interest. A multisystem data sharing environment (MDSE) is one of the representative architecture of the coupling [2,4]. In the MDSE, all coupled nodes are connected via a high-speed network and share a common database at the disk level. Each node in the MDSE has its own buffer pool and caches database pages in the buffer. Caching may substantially reduce the number of disk I/O operations by utilizing the locality of reference. However, since a particular page may be simultaneously cached in different nodes, modification of the page in any buffer invalidates copies of that page in other nodes. This necessitates the use of a cache coherency scheme so that the nodes always see the most recent version of database pages [3,6]. The subject of this paper is about database recovery that has to be performed when one or more nodes are failed. The complexity of recovery schemes in the MDSE is heavily dependent on the dirty page