On Monday, August 19, 2002, at 04:13  PM, Stephen Pair wrote:

> Actually, atomic transactions are a much better way of approaching
> object based persistence.  You really should manage concurrent updates
> to objects in the object world, not in the relational world.  If you are
> detecting any possible conflicts with an object based transaction
> system, you have no need for a transaction system in the database (you
> only need atomic updates...which can be accomplished with a
> transactional database with a begin, lock, update, and commit sequence
> (you are essentially using transactions to implement an atomic update)).

Well, yes. I do prefer atomic operations to transactions when it's 
possible. But you wouldn't believe the silly arguments I've gotten into 
with "database people."

Tantalus doesn't actually manage concurrent updates to objects. Or 
rather it carefully  keeps the updates separated into different editing 
contexts, and guarantees that the edits will be commited to the database 
atomically. When an editing context is commited, all the edits will 
either succeed or fail before another editing context can be commited. 
This allows Tantalus to play nice with other applications the modify the 
database as well.

Cheers,

Colin



Colin Putney
Whistler.com