This paper by Philosopher Pat Helland explores the limits to scale for cloud OLTP systems. He emphasizes the importance of Snapshot Isolation (SI) and highlights the evolving isolation semantics in databases. The paper introduces a novel design for a scalable OLTP database that eliminates the coordination issues between transactions, owners, and workers. By leveraging time-based partitioning and efficient transaction execution, the proposed architecture aims to achieve massive scale while ensuring external consistency. The use of row-locks and traffic cops for concurrency control, along with dynamic scaling of owner servers, are key components of this innovative database design. Pat’s work challenges traditional database scalability limitations and offers a new perspective on database architecture.
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2024/01/scalable-oltp-in-cloud-whats-big-deal.html