Things are different at high volume
Martin Fowler explains how things are different when server volume reaches epic scale:
A couple of years ago I was talking to a couple of friends of mine who were doing some work at eBay. It's always interesting to hear about the techniques people use on high volume sites, but perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits was that eBay does not use database transactions.
It's a fascinating look at how common conventions have to be re-examined when traffic reaches certain extremely high levels.
Comments
Not just high volumes
[Joerg] March 19, 2007 10:23:37.208
It is not just high volumes that drive a transactionless design. For example printers do not have transactions so anything that prints a critical piece of paper, like a ticket or work order will unfortunately have transaction less elements. As Martin mentioned it is a matter of deciding what is more important and how th system should fail and then going from there. In our case we decided it should never be possible to have the paper ticket without the DB record. The downside is that it it can happen that there is a record of a ticket but no paper ticket was produced.