Google dumps batch oriented MapReduce for Instant in favor of trigger (!) like database functions http://bit.ly/d4I1Vb scalability

VoltDB database SQL ACID OLTP lockless sharded http://bit.ly/9mfSo2

SciDB - Science Oriented DBMS at 100 Petabytes http://bit.ly/aplxAs storage database

Errors in Database Systems, Eventual Consistency, and the CAP Theorem http://bit.ly/biESTU datacenter

database transaction handling - discussion in comments on NoSQL & RDBMS http://bit.ly/9ASB2G architecture