I implemented something similar to the approach in this article. I was building a payment transaction system and ran into the issue of having locks and transactions in the database causing higher and higher latency as the queue got larger.

I never coined a term, but I implemented an “ALTP” using in memory cache library in elixir. The library is called nebulex. It was so simple to implement. Since the library supported distribution out of the box. I had a distributed in memory transactional guarantee that worked well in a short amount of time.

The cool thing was I also wrapped the database lock under the distributed in memory lock so in the case of a net split the database’s lock’s got my back. In normal circumstances it made things scalable because the in memory lock would prevent the client from connecting to the database until the in memory lock was let go.

In elixir doing these things are really intuitive and enjoyable and without requiring an external dependency. I think it took me only a couple of days work design / implement and solved the problem.