What Are We Doing With Our Lives?
Andrew Pavlo · 2017
Most of the academic papers on concurrency control published in the last five years have assumed the following two design decisions: (1) applications execute transactions with serializable isolation and (2) applications execute most (if not all) of their transactions using stored procedures. But results from a recent survey of database administrators indicates that these assumptions are not realistic. This survey includes both legacy deployments where the cost of changing the application to use either serializable isolation or stored procedures is not feasible, as well as new "greenfield" projects that not encumbered by prior constraints. As such, the research produced by our community is not helping people with their real-world systems and thus is essentially irrelevant. I know this because I am guilty of writing these papers too.