The Pit and the Pendulum

Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70’s with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID’s strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement of the last decade was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is the dichotomy between performance and ease of programming?

In this talk, I will share the insights I have gained in trying to unlock the performance potential of the ACID transactional paradigm without sacrificing the generality and ease of programming that define it.

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