Warding off the dangers of data corruption with amulet

Occasional corruption of stored data is an unfortunate byproduct of the complexity of modern systems. Hardware errors, software bugs, and mistakes by human administrators can corrupt important sources of data. The dominant practice to deal with data corruption today involves administrators writing ad hoc scripts that run dataintegrity tests at the application, database, file-system, and storage levels. This manual approach is tedious, error-prone, and provides no understanding of the potential system unavailability and data loss if a corruption were to occur. We introduce the Amulet system that addresses the problem of verifying the correctness of stored data proactively and continuously. To our knowledge, Amulet is the first system that: (i) gives administrators a declarative language to specify their objectives regarding the detection and repair of data corruption; (ii) contains optimization and execution algorithms to ensure that the administrator’s objectives are met robustly ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Nedyalko Borisov, Shivnath Babu, NagaPramod Mandagere, Sandeep Uttamchandani
• Keywords: Data Corruption, Database, Human Administrators, SIGMOD 2011, Unfortunate Byproduct