[Zope] transactions not supported by this server?

[Matthew T. Kromer]

Greg Conway wrote:

>Thanks Matthew, that's done the trick. Okay, with that panic out of the
>way...
>
>Apologies for posting immediately instead of looking, but somebody is
>working on the Server at present, and will leave when I've run out of things
>for him to fix!
>
>Anyway, he's upgraded MySQL-3.23.33 (a tarball) to MySQL-3.23.47-1 (RPM).
>
>I wasn't expecting one of the features of such an upgrade to be the
>ommission of transaction support!!???!!
>
>He knows nothing of Zope (I'm working on him!!), and MySQL is working fine
>with my (previous) PHP apps, and now (with a - specified in the db
>connection string) with Zope...
>
>So, my next questions are...
>
>(1) what has happened? Where has transaction support gone? Is it an
>additional RPM I can install or something?
>(2) do I need it? my previous readings and your answer seem to suggest
>yes...!!
>
>Many thanks!
>
>Regards,
>
>Greg.
>

I am not enough of a MySQL guy to know what you need to do to start a 
transaction-enabled server.  It's probably a config option, and the 
default RPM install doesn't turn it on.

Without transaction support, any data written to your database runs the 
risk of being out-of-synch with other data -- if Zope aborts the 
transaction (because of an error, lets say) -- then any work done on the 
database should also be rolled back.  If the database doesn't support 
transactions, it's iffy at best if the database adapter can make this 
happen.  

I really don't do enough mySQL work to know for a fact that it's 
terrible to not have a transaction enabled database, but I would think 
it is.

-- 
Matt Kromer
Zope Corporation  http://www.zope.com/