[vox-tech] Unnecessary RDBMS features [was Need your help in recovering database.]

[Tim Riley]

"Micah J. Cowan" wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 08:28:48AM -0700, Tim Riley wrote:
> > Soumyadeep:
> >
> > I'm affraid the InnoDB addition to Mysql
> > is over my head. After viewing the InnoDB.com
> > site referenced below, it's clear that this addition
> > provides the commit/rollback transaction processing
> > features that I believe helps make Oracle bloated.
>
> Are you actually saying you believe commit/rollback is a *bad* thing?

Yea--it's not worth its weight.

>
> If so, you are definitely the first person I've ever heard say that...
>
> I'm not criticizing your opinion; I'm just trying to understand.

Commit/rollback requires that a copy be made of each datum involved
in an insert, update, or delete statement. This is very expensive. But
why make the copy? I know my insert, update, or delete is the correct
thing to do at the time. If I'm making a mistake to the database,
I'll fix it when I catch it.

This feature is really a pain with large load processes. Before I learned
how to place "commit" statements
every 100 or so rows, the CPU would dog  making all those copies,
and sometimes I would run out of rollback segment (the copy place) space.

I think the intention of the commit/rollback feature is to undo all the
changes if an insert depletes the last available disk space. This is a
thoughtful
idea; however, because a unique index insures table integrity, after
allocating more space, I can easily restart the load from the beginning
with confidence.

> I
> agree with you that feature creep causes major bloat, which in turn
> causes huge opportunities for bloat.

If you want to expand on this more, there are other areas of Oracle-like
DBMS features that cause unnecessary bloating and headaches.

> But when you have such an
> important feature for guaranteeing data reliability,

I'm curious to learn what you consider data reliability to be
and how commit/rollback guarantees it.

> I would
> definitely consider it worth the slight risk the added code
> introduces.
>
> One reason I avoided using mysql for so long was specifically because
> it lacked commit/rollback functionality.
>
> -Micah
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