Abstract

Testing the reliability of high performance transaction processing systems poses many difficult challenges that are not adequately answered by conventional testing techniques. We discuss a new test paradigm, which is dynamic and exploratory in nature, and discuss its ability to meet these challenges. We describe an implementation of this paradigm in products that aid in efficiently testing reliable, high performance transaction processing systems at Tandem Computers Inc. 1 Introduction Mission critical database applications, e.g., a stock market system, insist on guaranteed data integrity in all situations. They also demand extremely high performance and high system availability (the cost of even short outages, of the order of minutes, is prohibitively high). Such applications employ high performance transaction processing systems that also have high availability characteristics ([TDG87], [SKPO88], [MHLPS92]). Tandem's NonStop SQL ([TDG87], [TPG88], [BP88]) is one such syst...

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