Building on Quicksand

Summary: Argues that with larger unreliable components, asynchronous state capture—primaries ack before backups—renders guarantees probabilistic and forces idempotent, retryable steps. Surveys probabilistic-execution and eventual-consistency patterns and outlines platform design directions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 116
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 0.00010726983
Overall Rank: 1,457 | 90.01%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Pat Helland (Microsoft)
2. Dave Campbell (Microsoft)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{helland_cidr09,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '09},
        title = {{Building on Quicksand}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Helland, Pat and Campbell, Dave},
        year = {2009}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,007	Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back	2019	CIDR	0.00012691341
1,240	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011536847
1,482	Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service	2020	VLDB	0.00010642079
2,665	Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums	2012	VLDB	8.280143e-05
5,265	New Directions in Cloud Programming	2021	CIDR	6.2941668e-05
6,477	PLANET: Making Progress with Commit Processing in Unpredictable Environments	2014	SIGMOD	5.8682525e-05
6,574	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.8371181e-05
6,914	Keep CALM and CRDT On	2023	VLDB	5.7404469e-05
7,646	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	5.5763131e-05
11,884	Performance in the Spotlight	2019	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,220	Engagements: Building Eventually ACiD Business Transactions	2013	CIDR	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
374	Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion	2007	CIDR	0.00019766683
2,586	Robustness to Crash in a Distributed Database: A Non Shared-Memory Multi-Processor Approach	1984	VLDB	8.3771396e-05

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