Lamport timestamps are sometimes confused with version vectors, which we saw in “Detecting Concurrent Writes”. Although there are some similarities, they have a different purpose: version vectors can distinguish whether two operations are concurrent or whether one is causally dependent on the other, whereas Lamport timestamps always enforce a total ordering. From the total ordering of Lamport timestamps, you cannot tell whether two operations are concurrent or whether they are causally dependent. The advantage of Lamport timestamps over version vectors is that they are more compact.
