Re: Mnesia files

Hello Jesper,

[..] If we lose power in the middle of a transaction, we want the database
> to come back either with the transaction comitted or not. We don't want a
> halfway transaction. We could achieve this by writing all our intentions
> down in a log, together with commit points. When the system then boots
> again, we replay the log from the genesis point up until the last good
> transaction commit point. Everything after that point, we discard and
> regard as not having happened.
>

By log here you refer to LATEST.LOG, right?

However, that log might grow very large. So we want a way to circumvent
> indefinite growth. We can do this by keeping a snapshot of our tables on
> disk. Then we only need to keep a global log from the last snapshot point
> and forward rather than having to keep the full log available for replay.
> But taking snapshots is a relatively expensive operation too. So we keep a
> "local" log for each table.
>

How these local logs are named?

The current state is the snapshot + a replay of the local log. New
> transactions enter the global log first, and are then flushed out to the
> local logs. The next dump folds the local log into a new snapshot, so we
> can delete the local log and create a new local log for future changes.
>

Got it.

Getting this to work is quite complicated, and it isn't made simpler by the
> fact that mnesia can also run in a distributed mode, where data is
> replicated among several nodes, and you have to handle several
> impossibility results from distributed computing.
>

Where can I find more info on the Mnesia internals besides reading the code?

>