Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

2007

Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion

Pat Helland

Argues large-scale systems should abandon ACID distributed transactions in favour of idempotent operations and business-level compensation, because coordination across machines does not scale.

Before you start

FreeIntermediatelink checked 17 Sept 2026

Read these first

Not a difficulty warning — a route. These are in the library too.

Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web ServicesSeth Gilbert & Nancy Lynch, 2002Proves Brewer's conjecture formally: under network partition a system must give up either consistency or availability.

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database SystemsAlexander Thomson et al., 2012Shows that deciding a global transaction order in advance, before execution, removes the need for an expensive distributed commit protocol at commit time.

Filed under Distributed Systems in Computer Science.