Title: Debugging Transactions and Tracking their Provenance with Reenactment,
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.