Re: User-facing aspects of serializable transactions

Greg Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:

> But it's certainly insufficient in an OLAP or DSS environment where
> transactions can take hours. If you can never know for sure that
> you've written your transaction safely and it might randomly fail
> and need to be retried any given day due to internal implementation
> issues you can't predict then I would call the system just broken.

I absolutely guarantee that it means that a transaction like that
should not be run at the SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation level
without some other protection. I don't know that I would say the
system is broken when that's true; it seems to me more a matter of
having a tool in you tookbox which isn't the right one for every job.

The question is, is it an unacceptably risky foot-gun?

-Kevin