Total and Partial Ordering
Explore the concepts of total and partial ordering of events within distributed systems. Learn why total ordering is straightforward in single-node systems but challenging in distributed setups. Understand how concurrent events and different clocks affect event order and system behavior.
Determining the order of events is a common problem that needs to be solved in software systems.
However, there are two different possible types of ordering: total ordering and partial ordering.
Total ordering
A total order is a binary relation that compares any two elements of a set with each other. As a direct consequence of this property, we can use this relation to derive only a single order for all the elements in a set. This is why it’s called a total order.
Example
If we totally order the set of unique integers ...