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Subject:Unlimited undo, take II From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Tue, 5 Jan 1999 07:32:02 -0700
Ed Gregory made an important clarification to one of my "flee the
office before the holidays" messages: <<OLTP systems do not routinely
offer a grand "undo" function. Your bank's ATM network is a perfect
example of how this doesn't happen.>>
That's perfectly correct. What I meant to say <g> is that an OLTP
system uses "two-phase commit with rollback" (if I'm remembering the
jargon correctly), which means that if the system (not the user) is
unable to confirm that the transaction was valid and properly saved
to disk, the original transaction is voided and you have to try
again. It's that principle (confirm success before committing to the
result of the command) that I was (ineffectually) trying to raise.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
