Infinite Scaling and Distributed Transactions

I posted a link to this paper a few days agon on one of the mailinglists I subscribe to.  I thought I would share with you guys as well:

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion

This is a really good read from Pat Helland on scalability in really large applications.  It’s not terribly new, but it’s definitely worth a read if you’ve not seen it before.

Personally, I like his descriptions of vertical and horizontal partitioning, but there’s quite a bit of meat there to chew on.

Pat Helland, btw, has worked for both Microsoft and Amazon.  He was a key part of the team which designed the DTC.