US Patent 7552150 Reason-based database changes

A method, apparatus, system, and signal-bearing medium that in an embodiment, store a reason identifier in rows in a database. The reason identifier identifies the most recent change to the rows. The content of the rows that existed prior to the change are stored in journal records. In response to an undo command, the most-recent instance of each record identifier in the records associated with the reason identifier are found in the journal and moved to the database in reverse time sequence order. In an embodiment, a promote operation requests moving the change upwards in a sequence, from a source version to a target version of the database. In response to the promote operation, a determination is made whether rows with the same row identifiers but a different reason identifier exist in a target version of the database, but the different reason identifier is complete.