I always cringe a bit when people point to papers[0] when it comes to software that has is supposed to have real world usage. Just because a paper described a system that handles distributed transactions well doesn't mean that this software exists or will be anywhere near usable in the next 5 years. Even if they are, only very few papers actually talk about a system that is already in production use. The few that do (bigtable, dynamo) usually are great though.

0: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/calvin-sigmod12.p...