Concurrency and recovery for index trees

Although many suggestions have been made for concurrency in B-trees, few of these have considered recovery as well. We describe an approach which provides high concurrency while preserving well-formed trees across system crashes. Our approach works for a class of index trees that is a generalization of the B-tree. This class includes some multi-attribute indexes and temporal indexes. Structural changes in an index tree are decomposed into a sequence of atomic actions, each one leaving the tree well-formed and each working on a separate level of the tree. All atomic actions on levels of the tree above the leaf level are independent of database transactions, and so are of short duration. Incomplete structural changes are detected in normal operations and trigger completion. Edited by A. Reuter. Received August 1995 / accepted July 1996