Debugging Transactions and Tracking their Provenance with Reenactment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-invasive, post-mortem debugging approach for database transactions that leverages reenactment and provenance tracking to understand and diagnose transaction behavior after execution.

Contribution

It presents a novel reenactment-based debugger that enables post-mortem transaction analysis without modifying existing database systems.

Findings

Supports what-if scenarios for transaction debugging

Reenactment accurately reproduces transaction execution including concurrency effects

Does not require changes to underlying database systems

Abstract

Debugging transactions and understanding their execution are of immense importance for developing OLAP applications, to trace causes of errors in production systems, and to audit the operations of a database. However, debugging transactions is hard for several reasons: 1) after the execution of a transaction, its input is no longer available for debugging, 2) internal states of a transaction are typically not accessible, and 3) the execution of a transaction may be affected by concurrently running transactions. We present a debugger for transactions that enables non-invasive, post-mortem debugging of transactions with provenance tracking and supports what-if scenarios (changes to transaction code or data). Using reenactment, a declarative replay technique we have developed, a transaction is replayed over the state of the DB seen by its original execution including all its interactions with concurrently executed transactions from the history. Importantly, our approach uses the temporal database and audit logging capabilities available in many DBMS and does not require any modifications to the underlying database system nor transactional workload.