> I could imagine making a single CPU core's job to be simply ordering all incoming writes relative to each other
Calvin is an interesting alternate design that puts "reach global consensus on transaction order" as its first priority, and derives pretty much everything else from that. Don't even need to bottleneck through a single CPU.
Like VoltDB, the one huge trade-off is that there's no `BEGIN ... COMMIT` interaction where the client gets to do arbitrary things in the middle. Which would be fine, if programming business logic in the database was saner than with Postgres.
Calvin is an interesting alternate design that puts "reach global consensus on transaction order" as its first priority, and derives pretty much everything else from that. Don't even need to bottleneck through a single CPU.
http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/calvin-sigmod12.p...
Like VoltDB, the one huge trade-off is that there's no `BEGIN ... COMMIT` interaction where the client gets to do arbitrary things in the middle. Which would be fine, if programming business logic in the database was saner than with Postgres.