Recovering from a failure using a transaction table in connection with

Abstract

A system for performing transaction processing on user data maintains a transaction table. The transaction table holds the identities of structured storages that have been opened but not yet closed by each of the transactions that are accessing the structured storages. Each time that a stream holding user data is opened in a write mode, an internal copy of the stream is made. Changes are applied to the internal copy. At commit time, the following metadata operations are performed as a single atomic transaction. Each copy is renamed to have the name of the original stream. If no other transactions are accessing the stream, the original stream is deleted. However, if other transactions are accessing the stream, the original stream is renamed to have the name of the copy. The metadata transaction is implemented with write-ahead logging. Upon recovery from a system failure, any metadata transaction that was in progress at the time of the failure is undone. Then the transaction table is read to identify each of the structured storages that must be opened and processed to remove any remaining internal copies of streams. In summary, the system provides robust multiuser transacted access to user data through file system metadata transactions and uses a transaction table to optimize system recovery.