This invention concerns a database computer system and method for making applications recoverable from system crashes. The application state (i.e., address space) is treated as a single object which can be atomically flushed in a manner akin to flushing individual pages in database recovery techniques. To enable this monolithic treatment of the application, executions performed by the application are mapped to logical loggable operations which can be posted to the stable log. Any modifications to the application state are accumulated and the application state is flushed from time to time to stable storage using an atomic procedure. Applications are recovered by replaying the logged state transition operations, in the same manner that most database systems replay state transformation operations to recover database pages. This application recovery integrates with database recovery, and effectively eliminates or at least substantially reduces the need for check pointing applications. In addition, optimization techniques are described to make the read, write, and recovery phases more efficient.