[Mulgara-dev] scalability and transactions

[Andrae Muys]

On 06/03/2008, at 2:41 AM, William Mills wrote:

> Interesting article/commentary on scalability and transactions in  
> databases.
>
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/ebaybase

It's interesting, but I think it is suggesting a false dichotomy -  
either a database has consistent transactions or it is resilient to  
client/resource failure.  The alternative approach that I prefer is  
optimistic transaction control.  If you are using optimistic  
concurrency, you trade early failure for the ability to get *both*  
transaction consistency *and* resilience.

So as far as I know the real tradeoff is:

early-failure, consistency, resilience - pick two.

My personal choice, and indeed what I intend to provide with Mulgara  
is consistency and resilience.

Andrae

-- 
Andrae Muys
andrae at netymon.com
Senior RDF/SemanticWeb Consultant
Netymon Pty Ltd