# Christophe Pettus: A Parade of Horribles, in Serial Order

> **Key Architectural Takeaway:** Sooner or later, someone on the team reads about write skew.

**Published:** 2026-10-15T16:00:00+00:00 
**Source:** Planet PostgreSQL 
**Category:** databases-storage 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/christophe-pettus-a-parade-of-horribles-in-serial-order.html 

## Executive Summary
Sooner or later, someone on the team reads about write skew. It is an unsettling read: two transactions, each correct on its own, each looking at data the other is about to change, both committing, and the database ending up in a state that no ordering of the two could have produced. READ COMMITT… (I consult on PostgreSQL through PGX Inc..)

## Architectural & Systems Analysis
From an OLTP/OLAP systems architecture, storage tiering, and data durability perspective:

- **Zero-Vendor Lock-in Formats:** Leveraging open specifications (e.g. Parquet, Iceberg) ensures multi-engine interoperability without ingestion lock-in.
- **Vector & In-Memory Throughput:** Modern memory layouts and SIMD-accelerated execution pipelines minimize latency in real-time retrieval.
- **Distributed Resiliency:** Decoupled storage and compute layers enable elastic horizontal scaling with strict ACID guarantees.

## Impact on the Open Ecosystem
Empowers data engineers with open, self-hosted alternatives to monopolistic cloud database providers.