A Parallel Recovery Scheme for Update Intensive Main Memory Database Systems

In update intensive applications, main memory database systems produce large volume of log records, it is critical to write out the log records efficiently to speedup transaction processing. We propose a parallel recovery scheme based on XOR differential logging for main memory database systems in such environments. Some NVRAM is used to temporarily hold log records and decouple transaction committing from disk writes, inherited parallelism properties of differential logging are exploited to accelerate log flushing by using multiple log disks. During recovery, log records are loaded from multiple log disks and applied to data partition in time without the need of reordering according to serialization order, total recovery time is cut down. The scheme employs a data partition based consistent checkpointing method. The log records are classified according to IDs of data partitions accessed. Data partitions are recovered according to loading priorities computed from update frequencies and transaction waiting times, data access demands of new transactions coming after failure recovery are given attention immediately, thus the scheme provides system availability during recovery, which is of importance for large scale main memory database systems.