Distributed Transactions and Isolation
Transaction guarantees are easiest to discuss when their scope and observable behavior are explicit. Start with an everyday service interaction that motivates asynchronous work and compensation. The PostgreSQL chapter provides concrete isolation terminology, but it is deliberately identified as historical version documentation. Strong consistency models helps distinguish ordering guarantees from transaction isolation before the HAT paper analyzes which transactional properties can coexist with high availability. Megastore and Spanner then provide two system-level case studies. This sequence suits engineers designing workflows that span records, services, or datacenters. Write a short concurrent execution for every guarantee you intend to require, and separate the atomicity of a business workflow from the semantics of an individual database transaction. Curated from collections by Dan Creswell (https://dancres.github.io/Pages/) and Fred Hébert (https://ferd.ca/a-distributed-systems-reading-list.html); commentary and reading order are original.