Re: ACIDity of Prevayler 2.6

Justin, thanks very much for such clear explanation. Some comments below.

On Nov 16, 2012, at 2:55 AM, Justin T. Sampson wrote:

> It's exciting to see such a passionate discussion. :) And also good that it's coming around to some more practical questions.
> 
> First of all, the ACID properties are ill-defined, incomplete, and redundant, so ultimately we shouldn't take them too seriously. Yes, A and C have some overlap, as do A and I, C and D, etc. They are a nice set of reminders of things to talk about regarding transactions in a persistence layer, though. And I still maintain that rollback is just one potential mechanism to partially address some of these properties, not a fundamental requirement for any of them.

Ah, OK - then we are in violent agreement :-). I misunderstood your (and Klaus's) previous statements to mean that rollback was always irrelevant, and never ever useful. That was what I was arguing against.

> 
> As for journaling transactions after executing them, that would cause queries to have the same latency as transactions, which is a pretty big departure from Prevayler's normal performance profile. It would hardly even be Prevayler anymore. ;)
> 
> Paul wrote:
> 
> > Klaus, you haven't answered my question. As far as I can see,
> > without something to maintain consistency in the face of an
> > unexpected exceptions, once that happens, the system is
> > inconsistent and cannot proceed *for all users*. You must
> > either a) shut down and fix the bug or b) remove the txn from
> > the journal.
> >
> > So unlike an ordinary db, which would isolate the exception
> > to a single user, and let others continue to use the
> > non-problemmatic parts of the system, an exception kills the
> > whole thing. That's unacceptable to me.
> 
> Why does it kill the whole thing?

Yes, OK, that was a little extreme :-) What I was really trying to say was the above - that rollback can be useful in dealing with certain cases (unpredictable but repeatable exceptions thrown because of coding errors), in a certain context. In our system, (which is different from a (normal, conventional ?) prevalent system where transactions and queries are written as specific classes), it is pretty easy to generically generate the inverse of each transaction, which makes implementing rollback on exceptions very do-able. The user has the same experience as a 'regular' database system. But - as you say above - it is not a complete solution for handling inconsistency due to any and all errors. It just reduces the number of situations where some kind of outside intervention is needed.

> 
> The point that Klaus and I are making is really that you have to worry about the kind of situation you're describing even if you do have a rollback mechanism. I've seen plenty of bugs in relational database applications that caused inconsistent data without throwing exceptions. At some point a user notices something wonky, or some feature starts breaking or throwing exceptions later due to the bad data. 

Agreed. I was not arguing against that - apologies if I was not clear

> 
> When such inconsistencies happen, it doesn't typically mean that the system is suddenly unusable for everyone. Maybe one entity is inaccessible, or some calculations display incorrectly, or one user can't log in. Bugs that take down an entire application are pretty rare, in my experience, but of course they do occasionally happen -- again, even in systems with rollbacks.
> 
> I haven't so far addressed the question of what to do in a Prevayler-based application when bad data creeps in; I've just clarified that you need to be prepared for bad data regardless of rollbacks. In the worst case, whatever your persistence layer, there's always the option to restart the system from a nightly backup. For smaller fixes, a relational database does provide the convenience of a built-in scripting language (some variant of SQL) with an interactive interpreter; in a similar vein, some Prevayler users have talked about using something like BeanShell or some other JVM-based scripting language as a superuser feature in an application, allowing an arbitrary script to be submitted as a transaction in a running system. The purer approach would be to write a new fix-up transaction in Java (possibly even with unit tests!) and either redeploy or hotswap the app in order to execute it on the running system.

That's very useful, and a few things I hadn't thought of. Thanks!

> 
> As for the history of dropping the food taster, it happened in this thread last November, with not nearly as much excitement as in our present thread:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAGs7EcU_X1%2BTE3O-CjCje2gsSoxxjnGTm8UZWb6ZkORE7%3Do77A%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=prevayler-discussion
> 
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-pb

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