Using Reenactment to Retroactively Capture Provenance for Transactions

Database provenance explains how results are derived by queries. However, many use cases such as auditing and debugging of transactions require understanding of how the current state of a database was derived by a transactional history. We present MV-semirings, a provenance model for queries and transactional histories that supports two common multi-version concurrency control protocols: snapshot isolation (SI) and read committed snapshot isolation (RC-SI). Furthermore, we introduce an approach for retroactively capturing such provenance using reenactment, a novel technique for replaying a transactional history with provenance capture. Reenactment exploits the time travel and audit logging capabilities of modern DBMS to replay parts of a transactional history using queries. Importantly, our technique requires no changes to the transactional workload or underlying DBMS and results in only moderate runtime overhead for transactions. We have implemented our approach on top of a commercial DBMS and our experiments confirm that by applying novel optimizations we can efficiently capture provenance for complex transactions over large data sets.