The Case for Single-Threaded, Aggressively Sharded Databases

Summary

The article argues that most transactional databases should be single-threaded and aggressively sharded, challenging the conventional wisdom of multi-threaded database architectures. The author contends that single-threaded shards would eliminate many complexities like transactions, serializability, race conditions, and locking that plague multi-threaded systems. The post explores why this approach would work better for many applications, particularly B2B SaaS apps, by simplifying architecture and improving performance through sharding rather than threading.