Pat Helland, Senior Principal Engineer of Amazon, gave a talk titled Programming for Scalability. Very good speaker. He went through the evolution to his views of building highly scalable systems and is now an apostate of the ACID, distributed transactions, single serializability scope-religion.

He walked through his approach to designing databases for high scalability from the start so applications don’t need to be rewritten when data-partitioning becomes inevitable.

He didn’t speak about Amazon in particular, but these are the kinds of things he works on there.

While this talk was quite high-level and following the “SOA and messaging” mantra, it was very practical too. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk, take it.