Temporally Faithful Execution of Business Transactions

Serializability is a prominent correctness criterion for an interleaved execution of concurrent transactions. Serializability guarantees that the interleaved execution of concurrent transactions corresponds tosomeserial execution of the same transactions. Many important business applications, however, require the system to impose a partial serialization order between transactions pinned to a specific point in time and conventional transactions that attempt to commit before, at, or after that point in time. This paper introducestemporal faithfulnessas a new correctness criterion for such cases. Temporal faithfulness does not require real-time capabilities but ensures that the serialization order of a set of business transactions is not in conflict with precedence requirements between them. The paper also shows how a temporally faithful transaction scheduler can be built by extending proven scheduling techniques.