Re: incoherent view of serializable transactions

Hi Kevin,

> The link didn't seem to work for me, but I think I found the article
> you meant:  "Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases"
> by Michael J. Cahill, et al
>
> An interesting work.  If nothing else, it will help flesh out the
> documentation of anomalies.  If the PostgreSQL community ever
> does want to better approach true serializable behavior, this
> should provide a good theoretical basis.
>   
Sorry for the broken link. Yes this is the paper.
Note that the paper was not necessarily enthusiastically received by the 
community when presented at the conference. While this is an interesting 
academic paper, it's practicality left a majority of the audience 
perplex. There was an interesting comment by Oracle folks: Oracle does 
not provide serializability but only snapshot isolation, and still users 
prefer to 'downgrade' to read committed for better performance. The 
Oracle guys experience seemed to indicate that there was no need for 
serializability (well, that's also less work for them ;-)) in their 
customer base.
Having both a foot in academia and in industry, I understand the 
intellectual interest for serializability on the academic side, but I 
still have not seen a single use case in industry where this was a 
requirement (but my db experience is probably narrow).

Have nice serializable holidays ;-)
manu

-- 
Emmanuel Cecchet
FTO @ Frog Thinker 
Open Source Development & Consulting
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