Re: Transactions: good or bad?

From: tj bandrowsky <anakin_at_unitedsoftworks.com>
Date: 6 May 2003 17:06:15 -0700
Message-ID: <af3d9224.0305061606.48d5daae@posting.google.com>

>
> You go for it Todd.

Ok, on one side, you are arguing against serialization, and on this thread, for. You must be either ornery or have a viewpoint of some sophistication, and in either case, I'll bite.

How transactions may not be necessary

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I imagine you might be able to dispense with transactions in entirety if you were willing to record every event as a record with a timestamp describing when that action took place. The storage of such events (T,X,Y,Z) is barred from storing any compositional knowledge about them or any of there terms. That is, if I store an inventory reduction, I am not allowed to store the total inventory, only the acts of reducing inventory in one spot and adding to another. In that case all I have to guarantee is that all of the events are captured in entirety, but that is fairly straightfoward to do, and do concurrently. Video games do this sort of thing all the time, as do energy loggers, but we could extend that metaphor to --everything--, were we not so concerned with capturing summarized views of the timestream rather than the more concurrent timestream itself.

The problem transactions solve but faults in it

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> > I for one think that in the future we will see more domain specific
> > database servers that make use of business knowledge in the domain
> > they serve to schedule operations more effectively.
>
> My guess is that you will find yourself mostly alone in that belief.

>
> Semantic optimisation is a general ability of any well implemented RDMBS.

Yes, but you have to implement that RDBMS on top of a server first. I'm simply going to sell a stock server. For the business of commodities, I have an alpha version of what I mean. I have a notation that is easier to use if you are measuring power, gas, etc, and calculating based on those measurements, than simple vanilla SQL, and I have a compiled implementation of that notation into a set of primitives understood by the server.

If you would like to have a look at it, try, http://www.unitedsoftworks.com/TestSetup.msi

Its rather buggy.. but it will be released by Q3 2003.

The future is starting now.

The installation doesn't make links on the start bar..but it puts stuff in Program Files.

> Semantic optimisation is exactly the case of using specific 'business
> knowledge' to optimise DBMS performance.

Yes, but I'm going to shrink wrap it. Advantage, domain specific languages. Received on Tue May 06 2003 - 19:06:15 CDT