[mike_hearn]

One reason Oracle uses it is because this mode scales horizontally whilst allowing very large transactions. You can just keep adding write masters.

The best implementation of serializable transactions I've seen is in FoundationDB but it comes with serious costs. Transactions are limited in size and duration to a point where many normal database operations are disallowed by the system and require app-layer workarounds (at which point, of course, you lose serializability). And in many cases you do need cluster locks for other purposes anyway.

[zadikian]

Spanner has similar limitations on xact size, maybe for this reason?

[mike_hearn]

Probably. I've seen it argued that TX size limits are a good practice anyway, and not having them is a design fault of SQL, but it's an argument on thin ice. Transaction size and scope is usually defined by the nature of the business logic, it's not something you can just define to be whatever you want without consequence. An RDBMS can do atomic and correct changes to an entire very large table without any developer effort. That might hang writes for a few minutes so depending on the nature of your application that might not be a feature you can get away with using, but if the table in question is updated by background workers and not on a latency sensitive path it can be a perfectly viable thing to do (on a good database engine, so not postgres mvcc).

[zadikian]

I'll keep my xacts small until that one time we have to do some big manual fix or migration. But you don't even have to do anything that wild to hit the Spanner 100MB limit.

[mike_hearn]

And 100MB is huge! FoundationDB limits transactions to 10MB.