Simple and efficient transactions for a distributed object store

Even the more or less "canonical", lower-level architecture of information systems needs to be revisited from time to time. Notions like persistence and transactions belong traditionally to the area of database management systems. There are, however many applications, such as CAD, VLSI design or simulation, which need persistence and could take advantage of transactions, but require especially fast implementations not provided by DBMS. We describe a low-level transaction concept used to implement our parallel main memory object store (PPOST), to provide main memory access times combined with the safety and convenience of transactions.