Invitation to Papers We Love #1 - Sagas (Hector Garcia-Molina, Kenneth Salem)

Hey! 😀

Finding time to sit down and go through shame-list to-read least is never easy. Even if you have it filtered and organised, there are always other priorities to push back what we planned. Also, going through the reading without confronting other people’s thoughts is not optimal.

That’s why I came up with the idea of the Papers We Love meetups for paid Architecture Weekly subscribers. We’ll take one whitepaper or article and go with it together, reading it out loud and discussing it as we go. What sort of articles could it be? For instance:

• Pat Helland’s works on distributed systems,

• Mel Conway's article introducing his law,

• famous McKinsey report,

• original REST definition by Roy Fielding,

• any other that you find interesting. I’m open to your suggestions!

I want to start with Sagas by Hector Garcia-Molina and Kenneth Salem. It’s a famous work that is foundational for managing distributed processes. You can find it here: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/cs711/2002fa/reading/sagas.pdf.

Not many people know that it’s not about business processes but the proposal on tackling issues of distributed transactions in databases. We’ll check how far the current understanding is from the original idea. It’d also be a decent opportunity to discuss general issues like the Two-Phase Commit, CAP Theorem, etc.

The plan is that I’ll be reading it out loud, stopping and adding commentary. I count on you that you join and add your feedback, and we’ll have a useful discussion!

The webinar will happen on Wednesday, December 20th, at 6 PM CET (UTC+1) and last 1-1.5h depending on the number of discussions.

Become a paid subscriber and join us live!

Feel invited, and see you there!

Best regards

Oskar