Future of data
Patrick Logan: I've written an essay on what I think the next database architectures should look like. If you read through my blogs you'll know it has something to do with tuple spaces and star schemas.
I'm looking forward to it.
Apparently, Patrick took a peek at WS-Transaction, didn't get any further than the author list and decided it wasn't any good. I agree that two phase commit is traditional... I hold out more hope for compensating transactions via asynchronous messages.
In any case, on the higher level discussion, I think that there is something more fundamental than propagation delays due to the speed of light. At some point larger systems stop being larger copies of smaller systems but become multi-cellular. The cell boundaries are not merely for scale, but represent trust boundaries. There are many reasons for this... privacy, security, robustness, encapsulation, etc.
A distributed system across trust boundaries is where I believe we are collectively heading. The internet shows us the beginnings of what is possible... for the subset of things that are generally always online and publically accessible. Expanding this to mobile and access controlled is the next big thing.