A transaction-consistent global checkpoint of a database records a state of the database which reflects the effect of only completed transactions and not the re- sults of any partially executed transactions. This thesis establishes the necessary and sufficient conditions for a checkpoint of a data item (or the checkpoints of a set of data items) to be part of a transaction-consistent global checkpoint of the database. This result would be useful for constructing transaction-consistent global checkpoints incrementally from the checkpoints of each individual data item of a database. By applying this condition, we can start from any useful checkpoint of any data item and then incrementally add checkpoints of other data items until we get a transaction- consistent global checkpoint of the database. This result can also help in designing non-intrusive checkpointing protocols for database systems. Based on the intuition gained from the development of the necessary and sufficient conditions, we also de- veloped a non-intrusive low-overhead checkpointing protocol for distributed database systems. Checkpointing and rollback recovery are also established techniques for achiev- ing fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Communication-induced checkpointing algorithms allow processes involved in a distributed computation take checkpoints independently while at the same time force processes to take additional checkpoints to make each checkpoint to be part of a consistent global checkpoint. This thesis develops a low-overhead communication-induced checkpointing protocol and presents a performance evaluation of the protocol.