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Interview: Dan Pritchett on Architecture at eBay

Posted by Mark Figley on Aug 25, 2007 10:44 AM

Community
Architecture
Topics
Enterprise Architecture ,
Database Design ,
Transactions Processing ,
Performance & Scalability
Tags
Database ,
E-Commerce ,
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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6 comments

Watch Thread Reply

See more at our next QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9. by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 25, 2007 11:25 AM
Flash player by Martin Probst Posted Aug 27, 2007 9:34 AM
Re: Flash player by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 27, 2007 10:54 AM
Re: Flash player by Sinkar babu Posted Aug 28, 2007 2:25 PM
Re: Flash player by Alex Popescu Posted Sep 1, 2007 3:58 PM
Great stuff.. by Peter Andersen Posted Jan 13, 2009 1:30 PM
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    See more at our next QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9.

    Aug 25, 2007 11:25 AM 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

    Aug 27, 2007 9:34 AM by Martin Probst

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

    Reply

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    Re: Flash player

    Aug 27, 2007 10:54 AM 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

    Aug 28, 2007 2:25 PM by Sinkar babu

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

    Reply

  5. Back to top

    Re: Flash player

    Sep 1, 2007 3:58 PM 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..

    Jan 13, 2009 1:30 PM by Peter Andersen

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

    Reply

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