InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Interview: Dan Pritchett on Architecture at eBay

Posted by Mark Figley on Aug 25, 2007

Sections
Architecture & Design,
Enterprise Architecture,
Operations & Infrastructure
Topics
Architecture ,
Transactions Processing ,
Database Design ,
Enterprise Architecture ,
Performance & Scalability
Tags
E-Commerce ,
Database ,
eBay
Most software architects take for granted the things that Dan Pritchett had to give up when he went to work for eBay. Take transaction control and foreign key constraints, for instance. While every architect has to execute some sort of balance between design purity an pragmatic realities, eBay's scale take that to an extreme.

Martin Flowler and Floyd Marinescu asked Dan Pritchett about these challenges in an interview that covers the impact of eBay's scale on architecture, business relationships, organizational governance and software design. Pritchett also covers some of the underlying theory behind some common architectural patterns and how eBay found a way to preserve the core principle of that pattern while creating highly optimized implementation that didn't follow the typical implementation pattern.

Watch Martin Fowler and Floyd Marinescu interview Dan Pritchett.
See more at our next QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9. by Floyd Marinescu Posted
Flash player by Martin Probst Posted
Re: Flash player by Floyd Marinescu Posted
Re: Flash player by Sinkar babu Posted
Re: Flash player by Alex Popescu Posted
Great stuff.. by Peter Andersen Posted
  1. Back to top

    See more at our next QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9.

    by Floyd Marinescu

    FYI, Dan Pritchett will be hosting the 'architectures you've always wondered about' track at QCon SF Nov 7-9, where the architects of eBay, Orbitz, Linked-In, Second Life, and Yahoo! will be presented.

  2. Back to top

    Flash player

    by Martin Probst

    I just whish this flash player would ever work for me :-(

  3. Back to top

    Re: Flash player

    by Floyd Marinescu

    Martin please email bugs at infoq.com to see if we can help troubleshoot.

  4. Back to top

    Re: Flash player

    by Sinkar babu

    There's no bug reported, but the player status remains connecting.

  5. Back to top

    Re: Flash player

    by Alex Popescu

    Sinkar, Martin, I suspect that the problems you are having are caused by an firewalled env. If it is not the case, then please submit a bug report and we will further investigate.

    ./alex
    --
    .w( the_mindstorm )p.
    ________________________
    Alexandru Popescu
    Senior Software Eng.
    InfoQ TechLead&CoFounder

  6. Back to top

    Great stuff..

    by Peter Andersen

    Very interesting speech..

    /Peter
    www.codelean.com

Educational Content

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.

Interview: Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.