State of the art self healing and self protection in DBMS

Question

At the moment I'm writing a paper and I need some input about the state of the art of self healing and self protection in DBMSs. Does somebody read some interesting articles or books about this topics in the last few month? Doesnt matter which DBMS you have read about.

Regards

Answer 1

SQL Server has Automatic Page Repair During a Database Mirroring Session in 2008+. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

A database mirroring partner tries to automatically recover from corrupted pages on the mirror database by resolving certain types of errors that prevent reading a data page. The partner that is unable to read a page requests a fresh copy from the other partner. If this request succeeds, the unreadable page is replaced by the copy, which usually resolves the error.

I guess you could include the repair mechanisms of DBCC CHECKDB under the self-healing banner and Page Checksums under self-protection. Clustering, mirroring and the new HADRON features in SQL Server 2012 are arguably relevant topics also.

Answer 2

Oracle has a similar feature to Mark's answer:

A detected corrupt block (for example, through a user's SQL query) is now automatically repaired by using a good block from a physical standby database. With automatic block repair, a user querying data in the corrupt block no longer sees the corrupt block error message displayed (ORA-01578). Instead, there is a pause while the corrupt block is repaired, and then the results of the SQL query are returned. The automatic block repair is transparent to the user unless the repair fails.