The core challenges of OLTP are changing
I wrote a few weeks ago about the H-Store project, which rejects a variety of assumptions underlying traditional OLTP database design. One of these is long transactions over open database connections. The idea is that the most demanding OLTP applications run on the Web, where abandonment is common, and hence the only sensible option is to break things up into simple chunks. Ideally, a transaction shouldn’t consist of more information than is filled into a single form. If you really need to store more state than that, think hard about (hopefully briefly) preserving it the same way you manage the transactional data you really care about. Besides, you often want to capture state anyway for later analytic purposes. If the application is assured to be designed with short transactions only, all sorts of annoying legacy connection-management issues are eliminated or greatly reduced.
Well, guess what — that assumption is looking awfully right. What do you think of first when you think of a demanding transactional app? Amazon? eBay? Me too. Or how about the first great transactional app category of all, airline reservations? It turns out airline reservation systems are web-based as well these days. Dan Weinreb, who has contributed some amazing comments to this blog, works at ITA Software, and pointed out that ITA and its competitors work in passenger-facing scenarios as much as they serve employee reservation agents. Dan also clued me in to something more interesting yet. These reservation systems almost never run on-premises, even when they are used by individual airlines. Rather, they’re operated on a SaaS basis.
I think ERP will go the same way. We’re not that far from the day when the largest SAP or Oracle CRM sites are the ones they operate themselves for their SaaS customers.
10-15 years ago, we’d have said that the biggest, baddest OLTP systems were in-house SAP installations or travel reservation systems, used by continuously-online employees in both cases. But times have changed a lot.
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