Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems [pdf]

Prof. Abadi's post on his blog about Calvin: <a href="http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/if-all-these-new-dbms-technologies-are.html" rel="nofollow">http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/if-all-these-new-d...</a><p>Reddit comments on the blog post: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/trb7e/if_all_these_new_dbms_technologies_are_so/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/trb7e/if_all_th...</a>

I went quickly through the paper, and there are some interesting ideas, like separating scheduling, sequencing, and storage.<p>Also, there are some details that leave me a bit confused... For example, they mention they use ZooKeeper for Paxos, while ZooKeeper uses a different protocol, ZooKeeper Atomic Broadcast.

I took Prof. Abadi's seminar "Database Systems" this past semester and really enjoyed it. Great class, great teacher and super interesting material. He's also very good at commercializing academic research, which is something everyone can learn from.

This is not particularly new, it's from May 2012. There's an easier-reading writeup here:<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/05/16/calvin-a-fast-cheap-database-that-isnt-a-database-at-all/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2012/05/16/calvin-a-fast-cheap-database-th...</a>

OK, sounds good but, Im getting the feeling that serializing database work across distributed parallel transactions queues is the solution. I think there is a little sunny optimism here about rollback frequency. Deterministic parallelism is not going to help you much when you have the same transactions failing across distributed nodes.<p>If you dont have a lot of rollbacks I can see this being ok.