"Six thousand years ago, Sumarians invented writing for transaction processing."... is the first sentence of the "Transaction Processing" book... https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558605084

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558605088/?coliid=IYEILMZI5DVNM&c...

and

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558601901

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558601902/?coliid=I2GWJZ9XJ5D4JI&...

I like "Architecture of a Database System" by Stonebraker, Hamilton, and Hellerstein (http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf) for an overview and then "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Gray and Reuter (https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...) for the storage-side of things. Granted these are a little old (especially G&R) so extra thought must be given for modern hardware (memory, CPU performance, processor counts, network, disks, etc) as well as distributed processing, replication, and consensus.

Well, not so many people use serializable in their systems (in the whole system, for every transaction) and that is common and reasonable approach. They use the minimal isolation level for particular transaction that keeps their data consistent. Most widely used safe default is repeatable read, in PostgreSQL terms.

Broadly speaking, of course there are some quirks in the field, let's start from "A critique of ANSI SQL isolation levels"[1] by Jim Gray et al., an author of highly respected fundamental book about transactions [2]. But the very kind of problems discussed in RDBMS world, is a rather contrasting with an "ACID? why do we need it?" attitude that is so often in the world of "web scale NoSQL".

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=223785

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...?