Patent ID: 7146364

Claim:
A method for recovering retained locks in a shared system environment having a plurality of operating systems sharing processor resources, in which each operating system is running a corresponding database management system (DBMS), the method comprising: determining that a first database management system associated with a first operating system has failed, the first operating system being one of the plurality of operating systems; retaining within a second operating system a plurality of data locks held by the first database management system in response to the failure, the plurality of data locks being held by the second operating system to prevent other database management systems in the shared system environment from accessing inconsistent data associated with each of the plurality of data locks, the second operating system being one of the plurality of operating systems; and restarting the first database management system on the second operating system to recover the inconsistent data, including bringing to consistency the inconsistent data associated with each of the plurality of data locks, the second operating system using a predefined plurality of the processor resources that are necessary to restart the first database management system and recover the inconsistent data.