Split Snapshots: A New Approach to Old State Storage

Google Tech Talks July 12, 2007 ABSTRACT Kurzweil says, computers will enable people to live forever and doctors will be doing backup of your memories by late 2030. This talk is not about that, yet. Instead, the remarkable drop in disk costs makes it possible and attractive to retain past application states and store them for a long time for mining or auditing. A still open question is how to best organize long-lived past state storage? Split snapshots are a recent approach to virtualized past states that is attractive for several reasons. Split snapshots are persistent, can be taken with high-frequency, and they are transactionally consistent. Unmodified database application code can run against...