Questions about multiuser locking in database design
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 17:20:27 -0700
Message-ID: <6nde5uk41foidu4bg4io9mgiojl5rk2e00_at_4ax.com>
Friendly (hopefully) Database mavens:
I'm in the process (as of this morning, thanks boss :) of designing a flat database system that will be used (at least initially) to handle data about image files - thumbnail filenames, resolution, layer count, colors used, that sort of thing. I'd like it to be pretty general, though, since I have to write it anyway. I've got a fairly short time period to do it in, about two weeks.
The database engine would be embedded in the applications that use the databases; the databases would be embodied in files.
The database structure itself doesn't present much of a problem for me; tables, records, fields, and indexing are all pretty familiar to me. My coding skills are decent in most areas, so I am quite sure I can kick a flat, single user database engine out in a week, maybe less, which would be fine, but...
There may be more than one application of ours that uses the database. The idea of more than one program accessing the same database sort of boggles me.
It is very possible that more than one application might submit a thumbnail to
this database at a time, possibly resulting in a collision of some kind and
subsequent problems. These applications batch process images, so they can be
running along and be spewing out files at a pretty good clip, especially with
smaller image dimensions. Eventually... bang! And of course generally, this
problem can arise in multiuser database use, so I'd like to solve it up front.
I'd like this to work in at least two environments: Inside MS Windows from our
applications, and from within a web server (certainly under Linux, maybe under
other OS's too), from a perl script.
What I would like to know is if anyone has some general information about this issue that I can use to implement some kind of basic, simple, effective and reliable anti-collision code. Web page(s), newsgroup post, anything I can get to in a hurry.
I have a vague idea of some kind of semaphore file that says "I'm using the database right now so you have to wait." Is that a decent tack to take, or is there something better? Do these two operating systems implement named general-purpose semaphores or anything cool like that? I used to code on the Amiga, and the Amiga OS had some kind of general semaphore system you could use, that's pretty appealing.
walt
Received on Wed Jan 30 2002 - 01:20:27 CET