Re: Commitment Control

[John Earl <johnearl@xxxxxxxxxx>]

John Hall wrote:

> We are in the midst of doing some conversions to old software.  One of
> the programmer/consultants we brought in is arguing against setting up
> commitment control.  I feel that it is a feature we should be using.
>
> He feels that there may be too much overhead on the system.  We are
> going to enable journaling on all these files anyway.

He "feels"?  That's wonderfull, but I would ask him to back his "feeling" up 
with
hard data before he talks you into abandoning one of the best data integrity
devices available to you.

I "Feel" that two many good ideas are scrapped because of vague, unfounded, and
unsubstantiated fears about "performance" or "overhead".  Many times these vague
impressions are left over from 10 year old attempts at using the technology.  
I'd
ask him to get out of touch with his feelings and provide some sort of 
benchmark.

Build a test app that does 10,000 writes with Commitment control and 10,00 
writes
without, and then determine if the performance difference is worth worrying
about.


> <snip>



> What is the general feeling on this ?  If we are posting a batch of 500
> records should we commit on every record, every 10th record or after the
> entire batch ?

Commitment control should be used to commit related data base changes all at the
same time.  A common scenario is the Purchase order Header and Purchase order
detail records.  If I update the detail, I must update the header.  If gfor some
reason one of the updates fail, I want to rollback the other update.

In the case of your batch process, if you want all 500 records written to the
database at once (and if any one record fails, then you want no records to
actually be written) then make your commitment boundary the entire batch.

Every 10 records doesn't make much sense unless those ten records are somehow
interdependent.

hth,

jte


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