Re: User-facing aspects of serializable transactions

On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 22:12 +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> No, I'm not. I'm questioning whether a serializable transaction
> isolation level that makes no guarantee that it won't fire spuriously
> is useful.

I am also concerned (depending on implementation, of course) that
certain situations can make it almost certain that you will get
serialization failures every time. For instance, a change in the heap
order, or data distribution, could mean that your application is unable
to make progress at all.

Is this a valid concern, or are there ways of avoiding this situation?

I would think that we'd need some way to detect that this is happening,
give it a few tries, and then resort to full serialization for a few
transactions so that the application can make progress.

Regards,Jeff Davis