The cost of distributed transactions between arbitrary databases

This talk's main purpose is to introduce protocols of distributed transactions invented in the last few years, which can be implemented on client side on any cloud storage supporting compare-and-set.

This talk's aimed at application developers using NoSQL/cloud databases and/or sharded SQL databases.

The audience will learn that:

• distributed transactions are not limited to 2PC (two-phase commit);
• transactions can be added on the application level on any database, including cloud databases, NoSQL solutions, sharded SQL databases;
• different protocols of distributed transactions (2PC, Percolator, RAMP) have different tradeoffs (isolation level, behaviour in case of conflicting transactions);
• transactions are not free, you have to pay for them (increased delay, increased bill when using cloud database).