Technologies are described for facilitating database system recovery in a distributed database environment having a master node and at least one slave node. The master node maintains an in-memory reference that includes transaction identifiers and their corresponding commit identifiers. When a slave node requests that a commit identifier be assigned to a transaction, the transaction and commit identifiers for the transaction are added to the in-memory reference. The commit identifier is sent by the master node to the slave node. The slave node writes a log entry to a commit log that includes the transaction identifier and the assigned commit identifier. If the database system is interrupted before the slave node writes the commit log entry, the slave node can request the commit identifier for the transaction from the master node, which retrieves the identifier from the in-memory reference.