User-interactive undo is a kind of recovery facility that allows users to correct easily mistakes by canceling and reexecuting already executed operations. Supporting user-interactive undo is essential for authoring processes in new database applicati...
User-interactive undo is a kind of recovery facility that allows users to correct easily mistakes by canceling and reexecuting already executed operations. Supporting user-interactive undo is essential for authoring processes in new database applications such as software engineering, hypermedia, and computer aided design. A partial rollback using savepoints supported by commercial database management systems(DBMSs), which allows only cancellation of already executed operations, is a restricted from of user-interactive undo. Although many applications use DBMSs, they have to provide user-interactive undo by themselves due to lack of support from the DBMSs. Since implementation of the user-interactive undo is Quite complex, it poses significant burden to application programmers.
This paper proposes a new recovery method facilitating user-interactive undo in DBMSs. Such a facility relieves the programmers from implementing user-interactive undo themselves in developing DBMS applications. The method guarantees fast rollback of transactions that contain user-interactive undos. It also provides users with the bulk undo operation that restores the database to a predefined point in the past. The bulk undo operation resembles partial rollback, but differs m that it allows redo that cancels bulk undo. Moreover, the performance of the method is comparable to that of the traditional recovery method in spite of added functionalities.