Major Points

The Final Exam will emphasize the material in Chapter 25 on durability (handling page and log flushing efficiently) and in Chapter 26 on the basics of atomic transactions (distributed commitment protocols) in distributed systems. In addition, there will be some questions on the material covered on earlier tests. These latter questions will be graded separately in an effort to see if students who had problems with the earlier material have now finally learned it.

Here are the detailed answers to the Midterm.

Here are the additional topics you'll need to know for the Final Exam

• Chapter 25, through Sec. 25.2.1 (to the middle of pg. 927).



• Be thoroughly familiar with the forced policy in which the log must be forced before any corresponding pages are flushed.



• There will be no questions on checkpoints, after-images and the corresponding no-force policy.



• For Two-Phase Commit in Chap. 26: Be thoroughly familiar with the reasoning behind Fig. 26.3, especially the portion that begins with tx_commit. Know, for example, why two of the operations must be forced,and what ones they are.



• In Sec. 26.2.2 be sure you understand the three time-out situations on pg. 952 (and later defined as T01, 2 and 3).

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