Think Through Transactions & Consistency

Overview

Production guidance for correctness under concurrency and distribution. Each reference paper captures the hazards that pass code review silently: isolation levels that do not mean what their names claim, dual writes that corrupt state, idempotency keys without fingerprints, locks without fencing, and retries that duplicate committed effects.

Core principle: Every invariant needs an enforcement point at an authoritative boundary. A local transaction never makes a remote side effect atomic, and a timeout never proves a rollback.

Domain Law