Adrian Colyer reviews an interesting paper on debugging distributed systems:
Why why-provenance doesn’t work
Relational databases have why-provenance, which sounds on the surface exactly like what we’re looking for.
Given a relational database, a query issued against the database, and a tuple in the output of the query, why-provenance explains why the output tuple was produced. That is, why -provenance produces the input tuples that, if passed through the relational operators of the query, would produce the output tuple in question.
One reason that won’t work in our distributed systems setting is that the state of the system is not relational, and the operations can be much more complex and arbitrary than the well-defined set of relational operators why-provenance works with.
Read the whole thing.