Eventual Consistency and XTP

I meant to post something about this article a while ago but only found the time due to the Christmas vacation.

It's a nice article and what Werner's talking about is part of what I consider real extreme transaction processing (not the hype term). As I've said elsewhere several times before, a few of us in the transaction community have been working on this type of problem dating back to at least the work we did in early SOA/Web Services standards. Even longer if you consider the work on extended transaction models. It's nice to see practical implementations of some of the theory behind these models actually being used outside of academia.

I'm hoping that in the next year we'll see some fruit coming from research and development we've been doing on real XTP, including the REST approach I've mentioned before as well as general approaches to large scale (extended) transactions. This should further illustrate what's possible with relaxation of the ACID properties we know and love, particularly when combined with high performance messaging and replication techniques. Sometimes it's hard to believe that this has been going on for so long.

Since this article started with a reference to Werner, it's worth ending with him too: congratulations my friend for your latest award. Well done! I think I could have predicated it ;-)