A low-cost checkpointing technique for distributed databases

For distributed databases, checkpointing is used to ensure an efficient way to perform global reconstruction. However, the need for global reconstruct ion is infrequent. Most current checkpointing approaches for distributed da tabases are too expensive during run time. Some of them allow the checkpoin ting process to run in parallel with normal transactions at the cost of mor e data and resource contention, which in turn causes longer response time f or normal transactions. Thus, an efficient way to checkpoint distributed da tabases is needed to avoid degrading the system performance. This paper pre sents a low-cost solution, called Loosely Synchronized Local Fuzzy Checkpoi nting (LSLFC), to these problems. LSLFC supports global reconstruction, and our performance study shows that LSLFC has little overhead during run time .