> VoltDB takes that approach.

No. VoltDB runs each transaction to completion. The design pattern I'm talking about runs non-blocking tasklets concurrently. Non-blocking as in yielding the thread when the time slot is up, or when encountering a dependency on another tasklet. Translating that pattern to databases requires multiversion non-blocking datastructures (i.e. lockfree with dependencies handled by the tasklet scheduler). Although different, NuoDB is much closer to the pattern than VoltDB.

Actually, I think some of the NuoDB ideas could have very useful application in the distributed version of the erlang VM.