Back in the early 90’s I attended High Performance Transactions Systems for the first time. I loved it. It’s on the ocean just south of Monterey and some of the best in both industry and academia show up to attend the small, single tracked conference. It’s invitational and kept small so it can be interactive. There are lots of discussions during the sessions, everyone eats together, and debates & discussions rage into the night. It’s great.

The conference was originally created by Jim Gray and friends with a goal to break the 1,000 transaction/second barrier. At the time, a lofty goal.  Over the years it’s morphed into a general transaction processing and database conference and then again into a high-scale services get together. The sessions I mostly like today are from leaders from eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. talking about very high scale services and how they work.

The next HPTS is October 26 through 28, 2009 and I’ll be there again this year: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/HPTS/cfp.html. Consider attending, it’s a great conference.

                                                --jrh

James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services

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