C ONTENTS

DEPARTMENTS

PUBLISHER’S NOTE 6

A New Era

James Maurer, ACM Queue

FEATURES

KODE VICIOUS 7

The Virtue of Paranoia

George V. Neville-Neil, Consultant

BASE: An ACID Alternative 48

Dan Pritchett, eBay

Can your application tolerate “eventual

consistency”? If so, huge gains in scalability and

performance could be right around the corner.

A Tribute to Jim Gray 56

We honor the contributions of the legendary computer

scientist and founding Queue editorial board member.

INTERVIEW: ERIK MEIJER AND JOSÉ BLAKELEY 9

The creators of LINQ and Entity Framework discuss

Microsoft’s approach to ORM.

BOOK REVIEWS 69

CURMUDGEON 72

There’s a Lot of It About