Two Pieces of the Pie

In all of the new main memory-oriented database systems, none of them use record level locking. voltDB instead does data logging, which is if you update 10 records, then you write the before image and after image of those six records into a log. The second piece of the pie has to do with crash recovery. A fair number of systems continue to use traditional right-of-head logging. That's going to seriously impair their ability to go fast.