Martin Folwer just referenced an eBay architecture decision to avoid transactions and the consequences that arise.
Being transactionless doesn't freak me out too much, because really most of the work that my programs are doing involve crossing a system boundary. A message to the mainframe here, a couple of web service calls, a write to a database. Pretty much all we can do is think long and hard about sequencing, and what do when any individual step fails. Which for our application (luckily) is generally "ship a message off to someone who can manually fix the parts that didn't go."
But we certainly don't have anything like distributed transactions, and I'm not sure I even believe in them.
I
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