There is no such thing as a general order; if people accept this then the problem relaxes and we stop trying to design impossible things.
Nodes shouldn't be observers. End users should be the observers. The ordering of event only matters from the perspective of the "I'm adding this to my shopping cart and clicking the buy button and then it said I bought it" story being internally consistent. The observer here is the end user and the end user knows what happens-before relationships were.
Databases should flip this ordering inside out and let the observers (or proxies for them) report what they did in which order. And it just happens that protocols for doing this already exist: distributed tracing encodes these relations.
A meaningful global order doesn't exist and attempts to conjure one only conjure a meaningless one, or one that throws away a lot of turns trying to perfectly order everything from some arbitrary internal observer.
Nodes shouldn't be observers. End users should be the observers. The ordering of event only matters from the perspective of the "I'm adding this to my shopping cart and clicking the buy button and then it said I bought it" story being internally consistent. The observer here is the end user and the end user knows what happens-before relationships were.
Databases should flip this ordering inside out and let the observers (or proxies for them) report what they did in which order. And it just happens that protocols for doing this already exist: distributed tracing encodes these relations.
A meaningful global order doesn't exist and attempts to conjure one only conjure a meaningless one, or one that throws away a lot of turns trying to perfectly order everything from some arbitrary internal observer.