Knowledgebase

Properties of PREIMG Files

The state of a PREIMG file at a point in time is stored in a combination of the following locations:

• Updated buffers held in preimage space. (Pending updates held in server memory: this is volatile storage)
• Updated server data/index cache pages. (Committed updates held in server memory: this is volatile storage)
• Filesystem cache pages. (Committed updates written to filesystem but not flushed to disk held in system memory: this is volatile storage)
• Disk file contents. (Committed updates written to filesystem and flushed to disk: this is non-volatile storage)

Only the disk file contents are persistent and unlike TRNLOG transaction file updates (discussed below), PREIMG file updates are not logged to the server’s transaction logs. For this reason, PREIMG files are not recoverable in the event of an abnormal server termination. In such a situation a PREIMG file is in an unknown state because an unknown number of updates may have not yet been written to disk at the time of the abnormal server termination. Also, because automatic recovery does not process PREIMG files, a PREIMG file rebuilt after an abnormal server termination is not guaranteed to be in a consistent transaction state. In such a situation, PREIMG files could contain data that was in the process of being committed but for which the commit had not yet been completed.