  The growth in variety and volume of OLTP (Online Transaction Processing)
applications poses a challenge to OLTP systems to meet performance and cost
demands in the existing hardware landscape. These applications are highly
interactive (latency sensitive) and require update consistency. They target
commodity hardware for deployment and demand scalability in throughput with
increasing clients and data. Currently, OLTP systems used by these applications
provide trade-offs in performance and ease of development over a variety of
applications. In order to bridge the gap between performance and ease of
development, we propose an intuitive, high-level programming model which allows
OLTP applications to be modeled as a cluster of application logic units. By
extending transactions guaranteeing full ACID semantics to provide the proposed
model, we maintain ease of application development. The model allows the
application developer to reason about program performance, and to influence it
without the involvement of OLTP system designers (database designers) and/or
DBAs. As a result, the database designer is free to focus on efficient running
of programs to ensure optimal cluster resource utilization.
