By keeping track of this clock as it is updated by various processes across the computer the distributed system can be much more confident about the order in which events took place.

By keeping track of this clock as it is updated by various processes across the computer the distributed system can be much more confident about the order in which events took place.

Mikael Ronström is the inventor and lead developer of NDB Cluster, an open-source distributed database underlying the MySQL Cluster platform.