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.

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   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.

   Reply

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   Flash player

   by Martin Probst

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

   Reply

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   Re: Flash player

   by Floyd Marinescu

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

   Reply

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   Re: Flash player

   by Sinkar babu

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

   Reply

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   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

   Reply

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   Great stuff..

   by Peter Andersen

   Very interesting speech..
   
   /Peter
   www.codelean.com

   Reply

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