From: "ara.t.howard" <ara.t.howard@...>
Date: 2008-09-26T13:16:08+09:00
Subject: Re: How to make Ruby _THE_ scripting language of choice, fold in SQLite


On Sep 25, 2008, at 9:34 PM, David Masover wrote:

not trying to be difficult but...

>
> However, many things that I would consider are, in fact, quite  
> transactional.
> Not as much as they could be, perhaps, but close enough.
>
> First example: Filesystems. With ordered write mode, you can simply  
> write to a
> temporary file, then rename said temporary file into place. With  
> unordered
> writes, add an fsync between those two steps.
>
> Any modern, journaled filesystem will make sure that the rename either
> succeeds or doesn't, and you've made sure all data is successfully  
> on disk
> before you rename.
>
> Implementation: Maildir.

rename is not atomic on NFS, nor many other network filesystems.  on  
NFS you have only softlink and rmdir as atomic operations.

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/
--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being  
better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama