Rollback (data management)In database technologies, a rollback is an operation which returns the database to some previous state. Rollbacks are important for database integrity, because they mean that the database can be restored to a clean copy even after erroneous operations are performed. They are crucial for recovering from database server crashes; by rolling back any transaction which was active at the time of the crash, the database is restored to a consistent state.
Atomic broadcastIn fault-tolerant distributed computing, an atomic broadcast or total order broadcast is a broadcast where all correct processes in a system of multiple processes receive the same set of messages in the same order; that is, the same sequence of messages. The broadcast is termed "atomic" because it either eventually completes correctly at all participants, or all participants abort without side effects. Atomic broadcasts are an important distributed computing primitive.
Vector clockA vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of N processes is an array/vector of N logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process.
Logical clockA logical clock is a mechanism for capturing chronological and causal relationships in a distributed system. Often, distributed systems may have no physically synchronous global clock. In many applications (such as distributed GNU make), if two processes never interact, the lack of synchronization is unobservable and in these applications it is enough for the processes to agree on the event ordering (i.e., logical clock) rather than the wall-clock time.
Durability (database systems)In database systems, durability is the ACID property that guarantees that the effects of transactions that have been committed will survive permanently, even in case of failures, including incidents and catastrophic events. For example, if a flight booking reports that a seat has successfully been booked, then the seat will remain booked even if the system crashes. Formally, a database system ensures the durability property if it tolerates three types of failures: transaction, system, and media failures.