Further Reading: Time, Ordering, and Causality

Back to Time, Ordering, and Causality

Research Papers

"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" (Lamport, 1978) - Original Lamport clocks paper - Link

"Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems" (Mattern, 1989) - Vector clocks paper - Link

Additional Resources

Books

"Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design" by George Coulouris - Chapter on time and ordering - Logical clocks and causality

"Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann - Chapter on ordering and causality - Practical examples

Key Takeaways

  1. Logical clocks: Use logical clocks for causality without global clocks
  2. Vector clocks: Vector clocks capture causality precisely
  3. TrueTime: Bounded clock uncertainty enables external consistency
  4. Ordering: Different ordering guarantees for different use cases