Method and system for controlling recovery downtime

Abstract

A method and system for reducing overhead associated with recovering after a failure. According to the method, a checkpoint value is maintained that indicates which records of a plurality of records have to be processed after the failure. The plurality of records contain change information that corresponds to a plurality of data blocks. A target checkpoint value is determined based on a desired number of data block reads that will be required during a redo phase of recovery. Changes contained in volatile memory are then written to nonvolatile memory to advance the checkpoint value to at least the target checkpoint value. According to another aspect of the invention, the target checkpoint value is determined using a circular queue of offset buckets. The offset buckets are used to store index values that are associated with buffers in the ordered list. The target checkpoint value is periodically set equal to an index value that is contained in an offset bucket. According to another aspect of the invention, the target checkpoint value is determined by calculating a maximum number of records that should be processed after the failure. The maximum number of records is based on the desired number of data block reads that will be required during the redo phase of the recovery. The target checkpoint value is updated based on the maximum number of records.