A Formal Model of Crash Recovery in a Distributed System

Author

Skeen, Dale ; Stonebraker, Michael

Author_Institution

Department of Computer Science, Cornell University

Issue

3

fYear

1983

fDate

5/1/1983 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

219

Lastpage

228

Abstract

A formal model for atomic commit protocols for a distributed database system is introduced. The model is used to prove existence results about resilient protocols for site failures that do not partition the network and then for partitioned networks. For site failures, a pessimistic recovery technique, called independent recovery, is introduced and the class of failures for which resilient protocols exist is identified. For partitioned networks, two cases are studied: the pessimistic case in which messages are lost, and the optimistic case in which no messages are lost. In all cases, fundamental limitations on the resiliency of protocols are derived.

Keywords

Commit protocols; crash recovery; distributed database systems; distributed systems; fault tolerance; transaction management; Communication networks; Computer crashes; Computer science; Database systems; Distributed databases; Fault tolerant systems; Indexes; Intelligent networks; Protocols; Transaction databases; Commit protocols; crash recovery; distributed database systems; distributed systems; fault tolerance; transaction management;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSE.1983.236608

Filename

1703048