Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Gerhard Weikum

David Bruce Lomet

Roger Shane Barga

Surajit J Chaudhuri

Gautam Das

Vagelis Hristidis

A technique is described for guaranteeing recovery in a computer system comprising of recovery contracts with a plurality of obligations for a message exchange between a first component and a second component. Three forms of contract are described, governing interactions between three types of components. Each contract is bilateral, i.e. between a first component and a second component. The first and second components have mutual agreement on when the contract will be released to facilitate log truncation, and independent and/or autonomous recovery.

Recovery guarantees for general multi-tier applications

A system and methods rank results of database queries. An automated approach for ranking database query results is disclosed that leverages data and workload statistics and associations. Ranking functions are based upon the principles of probabilistic models from Information Retrieval that are adapted for structured data. The ranking functions are encoded into an intermediate knowledge representation layer. The system is generic, as the ranking functions can be further customized for different applications. Benefits of the disclosed system and methods include the use of adapted probabilistic information retrieval (PIR) techniques that leverage relational/structured data, such as columns, to provide natural groupings of data values. This permits the inference and use of pair-wise associations between data values across columns, which are usually not possible with text data.

Ranking database query results using probabilistic models from information retrieval

A client-server computer system has one or more clients connected to one or more servers. During request/reply interactions, a client-side application sends a request for services (e.g., read a file, return some information, update a database record, process data, etc.) to the server. A server-side application request program processes the request, prepares a reply to the request, and returns the reply to the client-side application. The server runs a resource manager to log operations and data pages in a manner that enables application and database recovery. Among other tasks, the server's resource manager creates a stable log file that can be used to help recover the client-side application in the event of a system crash. To capture the client-server interaction, the server's resource manager records the reply in the log buffer and commits the reply record to the stable log before the reply is sent back to the client. This results in only one forced logging event for each request/reply exchange. The server further maintains an active application table and a message lookup table to speed recovery. The active application table lists all currently active applications running at the client and server to identify those applications that should be recovered. The message lookup table keeps copies of the logged replies that can be used during client recovery in place of the logged records to avoid searching the server's stable log file. The server further truncates parts of its stable log file when notified that reply log records are no longer needed by the client.

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Saarbruecken, Germany

Gerhard Weikum