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: 0.00019766683
Overall Rank: 374 | 97.44%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Pat Helland (Amazon)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{helland_cidr07,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '07},
        title = {{Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Helland, Pat},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
47	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.00044503718
68	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00038446206
144	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029554682
157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.0002863588
256	Data-Oriented Transaction Execution	2010	VLDB	0.00023172982
641	Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud	2011	CIDR	0.00015400863
1,014	Aether: A Scalable Approach to Logging	2010	VLDB	0.00012650747
1,187	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011760199
1,240	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011536847
1,282	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011338762
1,358	PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP	2011	VLDB	0.0001104203
1,457	Building on Quicksand	2009	CIDR	0.00010726983
1,775	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.7870611e-05
1,926	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.4705999e-05
1,961	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.4000927e-05
1,964	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB	9.3880822e-05
2,868	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	8.0156936e-05
6,173	A Data-oriented Transaction Execution Engine and Supporting Tools	2011	SIGMOD	5.9510717e-05
7,646	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	5.5763131e-05
11,114	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	5.093636e-05
11,279	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,479	Principles for Inconsistency	2009	CIDR	5.093636e-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

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