…similar solutions for addressing the scalability challenges:

On the Data Tier we see the following:

1. Adding a caching layer to take advantage of memory resources availability and reduce I/O overhead

2. Moving from a database-centric approach to partitioning, aka shards

On the Business Logic Tier:

3. Adding parallelization semantics to the application tier (e.g., MapReduce)

4. Moving to scale-out application models to achieve linear scalability

5. Moving away from the classic two-phase commit and XA for transaction processing (See: Lessons from Pat Helland: Life Beyond Distributed Transactions)

… a repository of information collected from one run and used on another run is on the list for things we want to do in Dolphin. It’s actually on the runtime groups list but we will certainly take advantage of it. There has also been talk of using annotations to give the jit a hint. This actually isn’t too popular since it is too much like “register” declarations in C. It’s only a hint and is too often abused.

… user authentication is a transactional event that requires fast, reliable, scalable, persistence and robust high-availability. To deliver this level of service, Google Accounts uses Berkeley DB HA for the storage and retrieval of user data and for replication, thereby ensuring scalability and availability.