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: 0.00028591413
Overall Rank: 298 | 97.93%
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
53	PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform	2008	VLDB	0.00066144767
86	The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00052563276
189	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00035925334
215	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.0003354907
338	Data-Oriented Transaction Execution	2010	VLDB	0.00026973858
664	Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud	2011	CIDR	0.00018465843
1,210	Building on Quicksand	2009	CIDR	0.00013260838
1,310	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00012658593
1,373	Aether: A Scalable Approach to Logging	2010	VLDB	0.00012309902
1,419	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012079793
1,485	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011706232
1,603	PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP	2011	VLDB	0.00011196902
2,273	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.1329997e-05
2,373	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	8.9476269e-05
2,445	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB	8.8057827e-05
2,548	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	8.5652459e-05
3,333	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	7.2093479e-05
6,088	A Data-oriented Transaction Execution Engine and Supporting Tools	2011	SIGMOD	5.2180814e-05
7,131	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	4.8228141e-05
10,891	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
11,073	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
12,284	Principles for Inconsistency	2009	CIDR	4.1945683e-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
5,254	An Optimistic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transaction Management	1991	SIGMOD	5.6013994e-05
1,419	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012079793
4,890	Scaling Replicated State Machines with Compartmentalization	2021	VLDB	5.8524216e-05
4,256	The Need for Distributed Asynchronous Transactions	1999	SIGMOD	6.3170934e-05
12,963	Commitment In A Partitioned Distributed Database	1988	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
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5,357	Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores	2012	VLDB	5.5505953e-05
2,834	Low-Latency Multi-Datacenter Databases using Replicated Commit	2013	VLDB	8.0458206e-05
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