With the shifting landscape of computing hardware architectures and the emergence of new computing environments (e.g., large main-memory systems, hundreds of CPUs, distributed and virtualized cloud-based resources), state-of-the-art designs of transaction processing systems that rely on conventional wisdom suffer from lost performance optimization opportunities. This dissertation challenges conventional wisdom to rethink the design and implementation of transaction processing systems for modern computing environments.<div><br></div><div>We start by tackling the vertical hardware scaling challenge, and propose a deterministic approach to transaction processing on emerging multi-sockets, many-core, shared memory architecture to harness its unprecedented available parallelism. Our proposed priority-based queue-oriented transaction processing architecture eliminates the transaction contention footprint and uses speculative execution to improve the throughput of centralized deterministic transaction processing systems. We build QueCC and demonstrate up to two orders of magnitude better performance over the state-of-the-art.<br></div><div><br></div><div>We further tackle the horizontal scaling challenge and propose a distributed queue-oriented transaction processing engine that relies on queue-oriented communication to eliminate the traditional overhead of commitment protocols for multi-partition transactions. We build Q-Store, and demonstrate up to 22x improvement in system throughput over the state-of-the-art deterministic transaction processing systems.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Finally, we propose a generalized framework for designing distributed and replicated deterministic transaction processing systems. We introduce the concept of speculative replication to hide the latency overhead of replication. We prototype the speculative replication protocol in QR-Store and perform an extensive experimental evaluation using standard benchmarks. We show that QR-Store can achieve a throughput of 1.9 million replicated transactions per second in under 200 milliseconds and a replication overhead of 8%-25%compared to non-replicated configurations.<br></div>