Protecting and recovering database systems continuously

Abstract

Data protection is widely deployed in database systems, but the current technologies (e.g. backup, snapshot, mirroring and replication) can not restore database systems to any point in time. This means that data is less well protected than it ought to be. Continuous data protection (CDP) is a new way to protect and recover data, which changes the data protection focus from backup to recovery. We (1) present a taxonomy of the current CDP technologies and a strict definition of CDP, (2) describe a model of continuous data protection and recovery (CDP-R) that is implemented based on CDP technology, and (3) report a simple evaluation of CDP-R. We are confident that CDP-R continuously protect and recover database systems in the face of data loss, corruption and disaster, and that the key techniques of CDP-R are helpful to build a continuous data protections system, which can improve the reliability and availability of database systems and guarantee the business continuity. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.