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: 0.00019491561
Overall Rank: 381 | 97.45%
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	0.00044066403
70	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00037859131
139	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00029480065
157	OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There	2008	SIGMOD	0.00028317906
261	Data-Oriented Transaction Execution	2010	VLDB	0.00022868935
641	Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud	2011	CIDR	0.00015255418
1,026	Aether: A Scalable Approach to Logging	2010	VLDB	0.00012423267
1,194	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011586405
1,245	Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach	2011	CIDR	0.00011353116
1,297	Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance	2009	VLDB	0.00011129439
1,382	PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP	2011	VLDB	0.00010858298
1,478	Building on Quicksand	2009	CIDR	0.00010548037
1,704	SLOG: Serializable, Low-latency, Geo-replicated Transactions	2019	VLDB	9.8314656e-05
1,943	An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control	2017	VLDB	9.3283112e-05
1,947	Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions	2014	SIGMOD	9.3241479e-05
1,972	OLTP on Hardware Islands	2012	VLDB	9.2858692e-05
2,873	SnappyData: A Unified Cluster for Streaming, Transactions, and Interactive Analytics	2017	CIDR	7.9225385e-05
6,284	A Data-oriented Transaction Execution Engine and Supporting Tools	2011	SIGMOD	5.8233939e-05
6,339	Cloud Actor-Oriented Database Transactions in Orleans	2024	VLDB	5.8092399e-05
7,785	Transactional Intent	2011	CIDR	5.4532421e-05
11,462	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	4.9793485e-05
12,770	Principles for Inconsistency	2009	CIDR	4.9793485e-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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2	1,194	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB
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4	5,002	The Need for Distributed Asynchronous Transactions	1999	SIGMOD
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6	9,515	Optimizing Distributed Protocols with Query Rewrites	2024	SIGMOD
7	13,518	Is Byzantine Agreement Useful In A Distributed Database?	1984	PODS
8	5,182	Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores	2012	VLDB
9	2,509	Low-Latency Multi-Datacenter Databases using Replicated Commit	2013	VLDB
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