Abstraction in recovery management

There are many examples of actions on abstract data types which can be correctly implemented with nonserializable and nonrecoverable schedules of reads and writes. We examine a model of multiple layers of abstraction that explains this phenomenon and suggests an approach to building layered systems with transaction oriented synchronization and roll back. Our model may make it easier to provide the high data integrity of reliable database transaction processing in a broader class of information systems. We concentrate on the recovery aspects here, a technical report [Moss et al 85] has a more complete discussion of concurrency control.