METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ASSISTING IN THE DETERMINATION OF THE SOURCE OF ERRORS IN A MULTI-HOST DATA BASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A data base management system operating on a first host processor in a multi-host data processing environment performs consistency checking to detect the occurrence of an error. Based on the severity of the error condition, the data base management system may optionally notify the user of the error condition, save to a file the contents of memory allocated to the data base management system, or abort the data base management system. For error conditions which require either saving the allocated memory or aborting the data base management system, a message is automatically sent to the data base management systems operating on the other host-processors in the multi-host data processing environment. Upon receipt of the message indicative of the error condition, each of the receiving data base management systems saves to a file the contents of memory allocated on the host processor on which each of the receiving data base management systems is operating.