Fault Tolerance via Diversity for Off-the-Shelf Products: A Study with SQL Database Servers
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Diversity and fault avoidance for dependable replication systems
Information Processing Letters
Improving the scalability of cloud-based resilient database servers
Proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Distributed applications and interoperable systems
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Fault tolerance is often the only viable way of obtainingthe required system dependability from systems built outof "off-the-shelf" (OTS) products. We have studied asample of bug reports from four off-the-shelf SQL serversso as to estimate the possible advantages of software faulttolerance - in the form of modular redundancy withdiversity - in complex off-the-shelf software. We checkedwhether these bugs would cause coincident failures inmore than one of the servers. We found that very few bugsaffected two of the four servers, and none caused failuresin more than two. We also found that only four of thesebugs would cause identical, undetectable failures in twoservers. Therefore, a fault-tolerant server, built withdiverse off-the-shelf servers, seems to have a good chanceof delivering improvements in availability and failurerates compared with the individual off-the-shelf servers ortheir replicated, non-diverse configurations.