Robustness to Crash in a Distributed Database: A Non Shared-memory Multi-Processor Approach

Since attention first turned to the problem of database recovery following system crash, computer architectures have undergone considerable evolution. One direction such evolution has taken is toward fault-tolerant, highly available, distributed database systems. One such architecture is characterized by a single system composed of multiple independent processors, each with its own memory. This paper examines the inadequacy of both the traditional definition of system crash and the conventional approaches to crash recovery for this architecture. It describes an approach to recovery from failures which takes advantage of the multiple independent processor memories and avoids system restart in many cases. This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Singapore, Aug. 1984, pp. 445453.