Dealing proactively with data corruption: Challenges and opportunities

The danger of production or backup data becoming corrupted is a problem that database administrators dread. This position paper aims to bring this problem to the attention of the database research community, which, surprisingly, has by and large overlooked this problem. We begin by pointing out the causes and consequences of data corruption. We then describe the Proactive Checking Framework (PCF), a new framework that enables a database system to deal with data corruption automatically and proactively. We use a prototype implementation of PCF to give deeper insights into the overall problem and to outline a challenging research agenda to address it.