TRACE: Zero-down-time database damage tracking, quarantine, and cleansing with negligible run-time overhead

Abstract

As Web services gain popularity in today's E-Business world, surviving DBMSs from an attack is becoming crucial because of the increasingly critical role that database servers are playing. Although a number of research projects have been done to tackle the emerging data corruption threats, existing mechanisms are still limited in meeting four highly desired requirements: near-zero-run-time overhead, zero-system-down time, zero-blocking-time for read-only transactions, minimal-delay-time for read-write transactions. In this paper, we propose TRACE, a zero-system-down-time database damage tracking, quarantine, and recovery solution with negligible run time overhead. TRACE consists of a family of new database damage tracking, quarantine, and cleansing techniques. We built TRACE into the kernel of PostgreSQL. Our experimental results demonstrated that TRACE is the first solution that can simultaneously satisfy the first two requirements aforementioned and the first solution that can satisfy all the four requirements. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.