Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL? The Database AND the Application Have a BIG DEAL: Their Isolation Semantics

Summary: Thought experiment analyzing asymptotic OLTP scalability when the database–application contract is RCSI (Read Committed Snapshot Isolation). Identifies how popular DB implementations and common application patterns unnecessarily limit scale and outlines rearchitecting both sides to boost scalability while remaining SQL/RCSI-compatible. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 524
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 4.1945683e-05
Overall Rank: 10,894 | 24.22%
DOI: -

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Authors

1. Pat Helland

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
23	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00083894938
390	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024607299
1,015	Spanner: Becoming a SQL System	2017	SIGMOD	0.00014638696
1,670	Amazon DynamoDB: A Seamlessly Scalable Non-relational Datastore	2012	SIGMOD	0.00010953756
6,458	Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? Analyzing Data Access for Distributed OLTP Architectures	2023	CIDR	5.0558683e-05

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