[Web4lib] What Sort of Library is Open Source Software For?

[Ross Singer]

I'm confused... what leads you to this conclusion?  Couldn't they have 
been using a db abstraction layer?

-Ross.

On Sep 23, 2005, at 6:57 PM, John Fereira wrote:

> At 04:05 PM 9/23/2005, John Creech wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, John Fereira wrote:
>>
>>> Whether a products beats the pants off another depends a lot on the 
>>> requirements.  I know a lot of people that don't consider MySQL to 
>>> be a viable technology for enterprise wide database driven 
>>> applications, especially in the area of transaction management.
>>
>> Interesting.  NASA uses mySQL for mission critical apps, I seem to 
>> remember.  I'll search that here in a minute.  I believe the Ames 
>> Research Center moved from Oracle to mySQL in some areas degree about 
>> 5 years ago:
>>
>> "MySQL Breaks Into the Data Center"
>> http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,85900,00.html
>
> I found this particular quote interesting:
>
> Clark says switching NASA's application from Oracle was a breeze. "To 
> switch to MySQL, we only had to install the MySQL database driver 
> module and change the connect call to the database interface module," 
> he explains. "Once this was done, we literally had to change 
> approximately one line of code out of 15,000 lines to begin using 
> MySQL in our first application."
>
> If that's all they did then they were using the default database table 
> types.  The default table type does not support transactions.  In 
> other words, the commit and rollback calls are no-ops.  That leads me 
> to believe that the application they were running didn't require 
> transaction support.  For example, an application which required 
> transaction support might perform several inserts/updates before 
> commiting the transaction and it any of the insert/updates failed a 
> rollback call can be made to undo the changes.  In a non-transactions 
> safe database every insert/update would immediately be committed.  If 
> an error occured during an insert/update the only way to fix it might 
> be to try another update, which might not be possible if the first 
> update failed do to  unavailable resources.  The result would be a 
> corrupt database.
>
>
> John Fereira
> jaf30 at cornell.edu
> Ithaca, NY
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