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: h68977c63cbb85fbf
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 0.00019432779
Overall Rank: 384 | 97.43%
DOI: -
PDF: Download (CC BY 2.5)

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	0.00043937456
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037761637
139	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029386971
157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.00028244257
262	Data-Oriented Transaction Execution	2010	VLDB	0.00022832269
644	Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud	2011	CIDR	0.00015201984
1,028	Aether: A Scalable Approach to Logging	2010	VLDB	0.00012390677
1,192	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011555425
1,255	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011313104
1,299	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011104379
1,384	PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP	2011	VLDB	0.00010824715
1,479	Building on Quicksand	2009	CIDR	0.00010511492
1,710	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.797642e-05
1,885	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.4209865e-05
1,952	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.2989778e-05
1,976	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB	9.2695591e-05
2,871	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	7.9024682e-05
6,298	A Data-oriented Transaction Execution Engine and Supporting Tools	2011	SIGMOD	5.8026646e-05
6,353	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.78729e-05
7,808	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	5.4326408e-05
11,520	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
12,819	Principles for Inconsistency	2009	CIDR	4.9605343e-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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