39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
3 articles matching “Transactions”
Architecture Decisions22 min read
A plain-language walkthrough of Pat Helland's 2007 classic "Life beyond Distributed Transactions" — the paper that named the patterns every large system already uses.
Query Optimization13 min read
“We sold 3 tickets but only had 1.” The code is inside a transaction, looks right, works a hundred times locally, and only breaks in production under load.
Production Incidents25 min read
Why “our queue guarantees exactly-once” is almost always a lie once your flow crosses a component boundary: Kafka EOS scope, ack-after-process, unique constraints, SQS FIFO, DB transactions with SMTP, retries without…