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Postings from May 2006
At 11:51 AM +1200 6/1/06, Sam Vilain wrote:
>I think the answer lies in the "checkpointing" references in that
>document. I don't know whether that's akin to a SQL savepoint (ie, a
>point mid-transaction that can be rolled back to, without committing the
>entire transaction) or more like a continuation that when resumed can
>see the atomic changes, and when exiting finally applies them (or rolls
>back). Perhaps someone else will have more of a clue.
>Sam.
Rather than thinking about "save points", it would be better to think
of the problem in terms of "child transactions". (Note that what I'm
saying here is simplified to assume there aren't any irreversable
actions, but it can easily be extended to handle those situations
too.)
Each time a context (a code block, either a routine or a syntactic
construct like 'try' is) is entered that is marked 'is atomic', a new
transaction begins, which as a whole can later be committed or rolled
back; it implicitly commits if that context is exited normally, and
it rollsback implicitly if the context exits with a 'fail' and/or due
to a thrown exception. (And yes, I see it as being easier to use if
rollback and fail are generally joined at the hip.)
One atomic context can contain another atomic context, so they are
layered; if an outer layer rolls back, it results in any 'successful'
inner layers also rolling back, so that everything which happened
within the outer context has rolled back.
If we simply have child atomic contexts to implement sub-transactions
of a parent atomic context / transaction, rather than relying on
savepoints or whatever, then it is much easier to make reusable or
movable or recursive code, since the code doesn't have to specify its
own atomicness differently depending on whether its caller is being
atomic or not.
Eg, we could have a situation like this:
sub foo is atomic { ... }
sub bar is atomic { ... }
sub baz is atomic { ... }
sub quux is atomic {
...
foo();
...
try {
bar();
}
catch {
baz();
}
...
}
quux();
All 4 of the above subroutines are individually atomic and will throw
an exception / return 'fail' and rollback on failure. If quux()
fails or foo() or baz() fail, nothing that either of those 3
subroutines did will persist. If bar() fails, but baz() succeeds,
then only what bar() did has rolled back, and the rest persists when
quux() returns.
Those are my thoughts concerning transactions. I haven't
specifically addressed any matters related to exclusivity of
resources in the cases of multiple processes or threads, but they can
easily be added onto what I stated, which is also useful when there
is just a single process with a single thread.
-- Darren Duncan
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