Impact of Disk Corruption on Open-Source DBMS

Despite the best intentions of disk and RAID manufacturers, on-disk data can still become corrupted. This paper examines the effects of corruption on database management systems. Through injecting faults into the MySQL DBMS, the authors find that in certain cases, corruption can greatly harm the system, leading to untimely crashes, data loss, or even incorrect results. Overall, of 145 injected faults, 110 lead to serious problems. More detailed observations point them to three deficiencies: MySQL does not have the capability to detect some corruptions due to lack of redundant information, does not isolate corrupted data from valid data, and has inconsistent reactions to similar corruption scenarios.