Apparatus and method for forming a homogenous transaction data store from heterogeneous sources

1. A computer readable storage medium having stored thereon sets of instruction, which when executed by a computer, cause the computer to:

gather a first committed transactional record from a first transaction log associated with a first data source;

convert the first committed transactional record to a homogeneous format to form a first homogeneous transactional record with a common transaction record header containing transactional context information from the first data source, wherein the homogeneous format includes a common transaction record header, including at least three of the group consisting of: a transaction identification from the originating data source, the order and offset of a commit record from the originating data source transaction log, the original time of commit posting at the originating data source, the number of data source operations within the common transaction record, and the number of bytes occupied by the common transaction record on disk;

gather a second committed transactional record from a second transaction log associated with a second data source with a format different than the first data source;

convert the second committed transactional record to the homogeneous format to form a second homogeneous transactional record with a common transaction record header containing transactional context information from the second data source; and

combine the first homogeneous transactional record with the second homogeneous transactional record to form a new common homogeneous transaction record format in a data store that is independent of a source format of the first data source or the second data source.

2. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 wherein the homogeneous transaction data store is distributed across a set of files containing committed transactions in historical order.

3. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to query the homogeneous transaction data store.

4. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to assess from the homogeneous transaction data store temporal data access.

5. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to assess from the homogeneous transaction data store data compliance.

6. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to assess from the homogeneous transaction data store fraud.

7. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to assess from the homogeneous transaction data store audit information.

8. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to define capture agents to form the first homogeneous transaction record and the second homogeneous transaction record.

9. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents identify incremental transactional changes from database transaction logs.

10. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents form a sequence of transaction files.

11. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents identify incremental transactional changes from a data extraction process.

12. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents use application program interfaces to facilitate access to custom data sources.

13. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to partition the homogeneous transaction data store across multiple transaction trails and disks.

14. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to utilize a heartbeat mechanism to order records across transaction trails.

15. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to partition the homogeneous transaction data store according to table name.

16. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents maintain redundant trail copies with a trail directory to facilitate scalability and fault tolerance.

17. The computer readable storage medium of claim 8 wherein the capture agents form transaction trail headers.

18. The computer readable storage medium of claim 17 wherein the transaction trail headers include:

a source host identifier;

information specifying a timestamp-range representing the time span of all committed records within the transaction trail;

information specifying the first and last committed transactions within the transaction trail; and

a trail sequence number.

19. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to process the homogeneous transaction data store across a master trail server and worker trail servers to facilitate disk read parallelism and filter processing.

20. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the sets of instructions when further executed by the computer, cause the computer to repeatedly apply a single structure query language query against a sequence of transactions in a transaction trail.