Letter from the Editor - in - Chief ICDE 2018

Global-scale data management (GSDM) empowers systems by providing higher levels of fault-tolerance, read availability, and efficiency in utilizing cloud resources. This has led to the emergence of globalscale data management and event processing. However, the Wide-Area Network (WAN) latency separating datacenters is orders of magnitude larger than typical network latencies, and this requires a reevaluation of many of the traditional design trade-offs of data management systems. Therefore, data management problems must be revisited to account for the new design space. In this paper, we revisit the problem of supporting strongly-consistent transaction processing for GSDM. This includes providing an understanding of the limits imposed by the WAN latency on transaction latency in addition to a design of a system framework that aims to reduce response time and increase scalability. This infrastructure includes a transaction processing component, a fault-tolerance component, a communication component, and a placement component. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future directions of transaction processing in GSDM.