System M: A Transaction Processing System for Memory Resident Data

Abstract:

System M is an experimental transaction processing system that runs on top of the Mach operating system. Its database is stored in primary memory. This paper describes the structure and algorithms used in System M. The checkpointer is the component that periodically sweeps memory and propagates updates to a backup database copy on disk. Several different checkpointing (and logging) algorithms were implemented, and their performance was experimentally evaluated.