[layer8]

The issue with SERIALIZABLE, aside from performance, is that transactions can fail due to conflicts/deadlocks/timeouts, so application code must be prepared to recognize those cases and have a strategy to retry the transactions.

[zadikian]

Right. So my code had a helper to run some inner func in a serializable xact, in rw or ro mode, which would retry with backoff. Like the TransactionRunner in Spanner. But even with no retries occurring, it was very slow.

[twic]

VoltDB took this to an extreme - the way you interact with it is by sending it some code which does a mix of queries and logic, and it automatically retries the code as many times as necessary if there's a conflict. Because it all happens inside the DBMS, it's transparent and fast. I thought that was really clever.

I'm using the past tense here, but VoltDB is still going. I don't think it's as well-known as it deserves to be.

[zadikian]

Interesting. How is that faster than just having the code running on the same machine as the DB? Guess it could be smarter about conflicts than random backoff.