Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion

Many decades of work have been invested in the area of distributed transactions including protocols such as 2PC, Paxos, and various approaches to quorum. These protocols provide the application programmer a façade of global serializability. Personally, I have invested a nontrivial portion of my career as a strong advocate for the implementation and use of platforms providing guarantees of global serializability. My experience over the last decade has led me to liken these platforms to the Maginot Line1 . In general, application developers simply do not implement large scalable applications assuming distributed transactions. When they attempt to use distributed transactions, the projects founder because the performance costs and fragility make them impractical. Natural selection kicks in… 1 The Maginot Line was a huge fortress that ran the length of the Franco-German border and was constructed at great expense between World War I and World War II. It successfully kept the German arm...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CIDR
• Authors: Pat Helland
• Keywords: Algorithms, CIDR 2007, Distributed Transactions, Global Serializability, Platforms Providing Guarantees