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Serial Transactions

In the distributed file system Deceit (that has no support for mobile computers) they use serial transactions (STs) which they define as [46, p.22]:
"An atomic transaction [has] two properties: recoverability and serializability. Recoverability means that the transaction completes or fails entirely. Serializability means that the transactions exhibit behaviour consistent with some total ordering. A serial transaction is a transaction that only provides serializability."

What they call recoverability4.4 is what I call atomicity, and serializability is a way to provide isolation in the sense that transactions do not intervene with other transactions performing conflicting file operations (which is the total ordering they mention). So in fact STs are (to some extent at least) IOTs!



Footnotes

... recoverability4.4
Even though a (serial) transaction partly completes, it might still be possible to recover, as in undo, from it's actions (manually).


michael@garfield.dk
2000-10-13