Patent ID: 7831574

Claim:
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.