Wednesday, July 27, 2005

ACID is Good. Take it in Short Doses

If you develop challenging distributed enterprise applications and systems, short ACID transactions are your friends. The ACID properties of transactions enable you to write software without considering the complex environment in which the application runs. ACID transactions bring simple high-school programming to the complex real world. With ACID transactions you can concentrate on the application logic and not on failure detection, recovery and synchronizing access to shared data.
With ACID transactions, your software need not include logic to recover the state of the application should it fail. Instead you simply define transaction boundaries in your application and the system ensures atomicity the actions taken within the transaction will happen completely, or not at all. If the application fails midstream, the system will recover to the previous state, as if the transaction never took place. If you have ever written an application without transactions that attempted to detect failures and recover from them, you know that logic can get quite complex

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