Chiller: Contention-centric Transaction Execution and Data Partitioning for Modern Networks (Technical Perspective)

Many computing researchers and practitioners may be surprised to find a “research highlight” which innovates on the way to process database transactions. Work in the early 1970s, by Turing winner Jim Gray and others, established a standard set of techniques for transaction management. These remain the basis of most commercial and open-source platforms [1], and they are still taught in university database classes. So why is important research still needed in this topic? The technology environment keeps evolving, and new performance characteristics mean that new algorithms and system designs become appropriate. This perspective will summarise the early work, and point to how the field has continued to progress.