
Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions - aespinoza
http://www.bailis.org/blog/scalable-atomic-visibility-with-ramp-transactions/
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mjb
Peter Bailis's talk at Ricon West
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rAdJkAbGls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rAdJkAbGls))
is a good introduction to this topic, and is more approachable than the full
paper.

This is very interesting research, both as a piece of distributed systems
theory and as something that's likely to change the way (some) large-scale
database systems are designed. When reading this paper it's worth noting that
a lot of the conversation, in both academia and industry, around distributed
systems is a conversation about constraints. From time to time new and
profound results do show up, but the general thread of research is looking at
application requirements and looking at system models, and trying to find new
and interesting ways to meet these application requirements in the provided
system models. This research, the earlier HAT research from the same group,
and active research into CRDTs are all great examples of this. I'm not trying
to diminish the importance of this research by explaining it this way. Indeed,
the 'how do we solve this constraint in this model' research is generally more
immediately useful, more applicable, and has a faster turn-around to
production systems than the more purely mathematically-focused research in the
same fields.

This kind of thing is really going to make it to a database near you, and give
distributed databases a great shot at beating single-machine databases in some
areas where they lag behind today.

