9417907 Eich This award will partially support travel, living expenses and publication costs for Dr. Margaret H. Eich and a graduate research assistant from Southern Methodist University to conduct cooperative research with Dr. Maria Orlowska and Dr. Robert Colomb, of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The collaborative research will focus on developing new checkpointing and recovery algorithms aimed at distributed databases. Database checkpointing saves the state of a database on a stable memory separate from the primary database copy. In the event of a failure of a primary copy, the loss can be restored using the backup copy of the log. Checkpointing techniques so far examined by the Southern Methodist group require no synchronization between transactions and checkpointing, and also facilitate a partial recovery of the database after failure. These features are desirable for both a high throughput Main Memory Database (MMDB) system, and also for a distributed database environment. Objectives for this cooperative work are to examine techniques for extending MMDB recovery to distributed databases. The specific work to be conducted will apply partition checkpointing to distributed database environments, will expand commit and partial recovery algorithms for distributed environments, and will perform initial analytic studies validating the developed approaches. ***
