Fifty Years of Transaction Processing Research (extended)

2026/05/19 by Philip A. Bernstein · 1 voice
Computer Science · #cs.DB #cs.DC

paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3722212.3727992

Abstract

In this short paper, I recount some early history of transaction research (including some of my own), explain why transaction research continues to this day (even though it seems to be a solved problem), and speculate about its future. This is an extended version of the paper that appeared in the Companion of the 2025 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD-Companion '25).

Citations

• Deuteronomy 2.0: Record Caching and Latch Freedom
• Eight Transaction Papers by Jim Gray
• Cornus: Atomic Commit for a Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation (Extended Version)
• The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale
• Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations (Extended Version)
• MDCC: Multi-Data Center Consistency
• Consensus on Transaction Commit
• Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects
• Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system

Discussions

• Fifty Years of Transaction Processing Research [hn, 3 points, 0 comments]

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