Re: Concurrency in an RDB

To all those stating that David should do some background reading - did you bother to look into Operational Transform (OT) as mentioned by David? There is potentially a whole new way of thinking about databases and distributed systems that should not be ignored.

Given David's area of research, perhaps his views are indeed valid and rather than being completely dismissive, this community should investigate what impact OT may have on DBMS implementations. I've heard no innovative comments here other that those made by David trying to link OT to distributed computing using a functional programming model. I would tend to agree with many of Davids comments that mutative operations are short-lived if (and only if) you are mutating "free" data. Any derived data should simply be marked as dirty and recalculated on demand - such recalculation should not be considered to be mutative in terms of the DBMS as it only affects application state.

As an example, David's view point seems to be that OT provides the commiting of local transations to some larger distributed database. This is quite contrary to the traditional DBMS where clients conect over s socket to a server and lock remote resources (what David called a distributed transation). Were comparing apples and oranges really - open you minds and we all may learn a thing or two. Received on Tue Dec 12 2006 - 09:30:08 CET