[ZODB-Dev] ZODB4 project plan
Phillip J. Eby
pje@telecommunity.com
Mon, 02 Dec 2002 18:17:19 -0500
At 06:08 PM 12/2/02 -0500, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> >>>>> "PN" == Pieter Nagel <pieter@nagel.co.za> writes:
>
> PN> I've allways disliked versions because they conjured up mental
> PN> images of spaghetti code in the DB engine to cope with the
> PN> combination of versions and transactions.
>
>I'm not sure why they configured up images of speghetti code. The
>notion of locking an object seems fairly natural for a database.
Yeah, but that's far from all that versions do. Most databases don't deal
with locks beyond a single transaction duration; ZODB versions are much
more like a revision control system branch, and *that* is what conjures the
images of spaghetti, or at least complexity. Revision control, like
transactions, are something that's hard to do correctly. In principle the
algorithms are simple, but in practice there are always nasty little
details that have to be handled just right.