  Media failures usually leave database systems unavailable for several hours
until recovery is complete, especially in applications with large devices and
high transaction volume. Previous work introduced a technique called
single-pass restore, which increases restore bandwidth and thus substantially
decreases time to repair. Instant restore goes further as it permits read/write
access to any data on a device undergoing restore--even data not yet
restored--by restoring individual data segments on demand. Thus, the restore
process is guided primarily by the needs of applications, and the observed mean
time to repair is effectively reduced from several hours to a few seconds.
  This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of instant restore. The
technique is incrementally implemented on a system starting with the
traditional ARIES design for logging and recovery. Experiments show that the
transaction latency perceived after a media failure can be cut down to less
than a second and that the overhead imposed by the technique on normal
processing is minimal. The net effect is that a few "nines" of availability are
added to the system using simple and low-overhead software techniques.

Databases