Re: The C in ACID

Paul Mansour wrote:
> I'm reading a new paper by David Lomet and Roger Barga, two respected
> (I think!) senior researchers at Microsoft, and come across the
> following in discussing the ACID properties of a DBMS:
>
> "However, these techniques [Atomicity, Isolation, and Durable], which
> are commonly known in the database technical community, do not
> entirely cope with the problem of consistency (C), which is primarily
> the responsibility of a user transaction to preserve."
>
> If the meaning of this sentence is somewhat unclear, later in the paper
> they state:
>
> "Recall that it is the user, not the database system, which provides
> the "C" in "ACID" transactions."
>
> ...which seems to unequivocally indicate a complete confusion between
> the concepts of consistency and correctness. Or am I missing something?
>
> The paper, "Recovery from Bad User Transactions" may be found here:
>
> http://research.microsoft.com/db/immortaldb/
>
> Scroll down to the bottom, its the first reference.

Isn't the 'C' just the second letter in a nice looking, but essentially meaningless, acronym? You know how people in this industry *love* acronyms. Received on Sun Aug 27 2006 - 07:57:41 CEST