Tom, good comments. I do disagree on one point though:

>
> In practice, it's only two.  The "don't know" has the exact
> same behavior as
> the "cannot commit".  So, as with app server managed OCC, the
> programmer has
> to deal with a single failure scenario.

I may be being overly pedantic, but I think that there are differences in
some circumstances. In the "don't know" case (i.e. the necessary history has
been aged out) you might potentially fall back on less efficient checks to
determine an exact answer, e.g. the kind of explicit verification discussed
in other threads. Whether it is worth doing so will depend on the exact
semantics and value of the tx. Also there are circumstances in which it is
worth telling the user to try again after a "don't know" but not after a
"can't commit" - think substitutable resources versus unique resources.

However, I will readily agree that in a GREAT MANY real world applications,
treating a "don't know" the same as a "cannot commit" will give the
appropriate application behavior. Still, its something that a designer has
to consider, especially in a scenario of high concurrency


> Also, the "don't
> know" scenario
> results from a database not properly configured to handle the
> concurrent
> load.  This is a configuration (tuning) issue, not a normal
> failure scenario
> (IMHO).

Yes... and no :-> Certainly the "don't know" comes from the database not
being configured to handle the concurrent load, but in the real world the
concurrent load may be unpredictable (or have load spikes that it is
inefficient to configure for in normal usage). Either way, dealing with the
failure scenario ends up with the developer, whose program has to shield the
user from a completely incomprehensible error message...

regards,
Carl

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