Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion

Summary: Argues that heavyweight distributed‑transaction protocols (2PC/Paxos/quorum) are impractical for large-scale applications, so developers abandon global serializability. Identifies patterns for managing repartitionable fine‑grained data and inter‑shard messaging, urging platform support. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 69
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 0.00028556426
Overall Rank: 298 | 97.94%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Pat Helland

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
54	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.0006582344
88	The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.0005262025
189	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00035934191
215	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.00033609709
336	Data-Oriented Transaction Execution	2010	VLDB	0.00027008897
664	Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud	2011	CIDR	0.0001846313
1,213	Building on Quicksand	2009	CIDR	0.00013251295
1,311	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00012650881
1,369	Aether: A Scalable Approach to Logging	2010	VLDB	0.0001235533
1,418	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012082141
1,483	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011713238
1,594	PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP	2011	VLDB	0.00011212541
2,276	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.1320955e-05
2,358	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	8.9675888e-05
2,437	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB	8.8206221e-05
2,548	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	8.5594603e-05
3,335	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	7.2023806e-05
6,084	A Data-oriented Transaction Execution Engine and Supporting Tools	2011	SIGMOD	5.2171102e-05
7,130	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	4.8181792e-05
10,895	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
11,076	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
12,292	Principles for Inconsistency	2009	CIDR	4.1905499e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,261	An Optimistic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transaction Management	1991	SIGMOD	5.5963524e-05
1,418	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012082141
4,895	Scaling Replicated State Machines with Compartmentalization	2021	VLDB	5.8467977e-05
4,252	The Need for Distributed Asynchronous Transactions	1999	SIGMOD	6.3116344e-05
12,973	Commitment In A Partitioned Distributed Database	1988	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
9,274	Optimizing Distributed Protocols with Query Rewrites	2024	SIGMOD	4.3613923e-05
13,040	Is Byzantine Agreement Useful In A Distributed Database?	1984	PODS	4.1905499e-05
5,366	Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores	2012	VLDB	5.546301e-05
2,820	Low-Latency Multi-Datacenter Databases using Replicated Commit	2013	VLDB	8.0655916e-05
7,969	How can we support Grid Transactions? Towards Peer-to-Peer Transaction Processing*	2005	CIDR	4.6089395e-05