https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1402.2237/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779459urn:hackerpapers:mention:1402.2237:9779459Thu, 25 Jun 2015 17:25:47 GMT<p>I am afraid your premise is incorrect. Foreign keys can be enforced (particularly on insert-only or insert-mostly workloads) with very little contention, even in a distributed system: http://www.bailis.org/papers/ramp-sigmod2014.pdf And lest you think there is some hidden constant factor here that destroys real performance at the cost of &quot;scalability,&quot; the techniques from that paper were used to completely destroy the TPC-C benchmark: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2237.pdf Admittedly this stuff is not yet implemented in traditional RDBMSes, but there is absolutely no reason why it could not be…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1402.2237/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.DB