A survey of distributed database checkpointing

Checkpointing a database is a vital technique to reduce the recovery time in the presence of a failure. For distributed databases, checkpointing also provides an efficient way to perform global reconstruction. In this paper, we survey and classify previous approaches for checkpointing a distributed database. Since the need for global reconstruction is infrequent in most distributed databases, a less restrictive and less resource-consuming approach to checkpoint distributed databases in an integrated distributed database system is recommended over a transaction consistent checkpoint approach. For a federated or multidatabase system, any type of global consistent checkpoint is difficult to achieve without violating local autonomy.