InProcDiskSim: testing database recovery on commodity disk drives

  • Authors:

  • Robin Dhamankar;Hanuma Kodavalla

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Testing Database Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Database recovery mechanisms depend on various guarantees provided by the underlying storage media. With the changing industrial landscape, database systems are deployed on storage media that may not provide all the guarantees that traditional implementations may have relied on. In the absence of these stricter guarantees, enhancements may have to be made to the database engine to support newer storage media. Testing database recoverability with the new implementation requires simulation of predictable failure conditions which may be difficult, costly and error-prone. In this paper we present our experience in testing the enhancements made to enforce recoverability in the absence of write-through guarantees in commodity disks. We propose InProcDiskSim, a test framework that simulates the relevant features of the storage media running in the same process as the database engine, thereby providing a cheap, predictable and programmatic method to test context specific failure conditions. We also discuss how our methods apply beyond the specific feature that they were originally used to test.