Re: Concurrency in an RDB

Marshall wrote:
> On Dec 19, 5:36 pm, "David" <davi..._at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
> So, howsabout you give us an example? So far all we've heard
> from you has been a description of properties of your proposed
> solution. Please show me an example of doing something
> modestly nifty with OT that might not hold up so well in
> a distributed transaction setting.
>
> Assume I'm already aware that network cards, switches,
> and whole machines periodically misbehave. (Oh, how
> I wish I was *less* aware of that.)
>

I've got some thoguhts for applications for OT. Each of the following benefit greatly by allowing users to edit a local copy of the data, allowing concurrent work (but not interactive collaboration) to be performed.

1. You could replace ActiveSync and other such technologies which sychronise data between PC's and mobile devices. Wouldn't that be nice - a synchronisation protocol that actually works. Extend this to arbitrary data, not just the usual contacts, appointments, text notes, etc. Also extend it to work across many users and many machines, not just a pair of machines with a single user.
2. Source code management systems would benefit from OT. Developers simply can not work with a centralised set of source code files. Each developers working set diverges locally.
3. Collaborative editing of documents (eg, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, presentations, etc) in a disconnected environment (that is, not interactive like Writely from Google).

I expect that where ever you can imagine collaboration in an "offline" or "disconnected" sense, OT would help. Received on Tue Dec 19 2006 - 23:42:12 CST