Modern techniques for transaction-oriented database recovery

Abstract

Transaction-oriented database recovery has been a “solved problem” for at least 25 years since the introduction of the ARIES methods for logging and recovery. However, recent technological developments have urged the need for new software architectures that can better exploit the efficiency of modern hardware. In the context of recovery, new algorithms are required to effectively accommodate the exponential decrease in main-memory cost, the advent of flash memory, the rapid expansion into many-core CPUs, the ever-increasing capacity of magnetic disks, and, on the long term, the potential adoption of non-volatile memory. In our research, we evaluated a variety of new software techniques for efficient transaction-oriented database recovery, focusing on availability and architectural simplicity. The techniques presented here differ from most recent work in the field in which they aim to be hardware-agnostic, supporting different memory and storage configurations with the same software, as well as fully functional in comparison with traditional database systems, e.g., by supporting media recovery, index management, larger-than-memory datasets, and arbitrary access structures with structural modifications.