Inferring a Serialization Order for Distributed Transactions

Abstract

Data partitioning is often used to scale-up a database system. In a centralized database system, the serialization order of commited update transactions can be inferred from the database log. To achieve this in a shared-nothing distributed database, the serialization order of update transactions must be inferred from multiple database logs. We describe a technique to generate a single stream of updates from logs of multiple database systems. This single stream represents a valid serialization order of update transactions at the sites over which the database is partitioned.