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 to {\em some} serial 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 introduces {\em temporal faithfulness} as 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.