Re: Major features for 9.1

Greg Smith <greg@2ndQuadrant.com> wrote:

> I just fixed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSI to include this
> acronym, and the page I found to point it toward:
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation#Making_Snapshot_Isolation_Serializable
> doesn't suggest it's anything other than a theoretical concept so
> far.

Thanks for taking care of the SSI page.  I've had my eye on that,
the page you pointed it to, and this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_%28database_systems%29

That last is pretty SS2PL-oriented, although it has a token
reference to snapshot isolation.  Those two pages both probably need
significant work to eliminate that bias and properly reference the
fact that SSI (or as Wikipedia refers to it, SerializableSI) has
moved from an academic concept to a production product.

I've been a little concerned about updating those pages because I
know they have been whacked around to support different biases over
the last few years, and I didn't want to get into some battle over
it; so on the 12th of April I tried to initiate a discussion on the
topic on the Discussion tab of the page you linked to.  So far there
has been no response, so perhaps those who were so eager to battle
it out on those pages have moved on and won't raise a fuss.  At a
minimum they should be able to see that I made the effort to discuss
it before making the changes.

> I think there's a very real academic possibility for your work
> here too.  I'd be writing to the ACM about your upcoming paper
> "Implementing Serializable Snapshot Isolation in a MVCC Database"
> if I were you.

I'm leaving that to Dan.  I'm not in a "publish or perish"
environment, nor at this point even looking to build cred for
consulting gigs.  Academic papers are not really my forte anyway.

> (Be good to update the Wikipedia pages on this at that point, too,
> once there's a long-term documentation URL for 9.1)

Yeah, the link to the PostgreSQL docs on the page you pointed to
still references the 8.2 docs.  I wonder whether it's better form to
link to the 9.1 docs once they're out, or to link to the "current"
URL, so that it's always automatically pointing to the latest
version.

-Kevin