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Transactionless

Welcome back Mr. Caputo...

A number of people have been commenting on Martin Fowler's "Transactionless" essay. I didn't realize how unusual that approach seems.

I've said a number of times in public that if I had not begun my career by reading COBOL instead of, say, Java, I probably would not have gotten so far so fast.

Likewise, if I had not begun my career dealing with ISAM files instead of relational databases, I would probably have a much shallower understanding of what databases are and how they work.

In fact, of all the projects I've ever been a part of, one of the most impressive, most critical, and most educational was converting several enormous databases full of life-critical 911 location information from what was essentially a fancy ISAM arrangement to a true SQL database. Even at the time, though, our target SQL db did not have full support for referential integrity, so I became quite familiar with code that handles both referential-integrity checks and also that handles commits and rollbacks based on those checks.

I once wrote an article called "Old School Meets New Wave". Its funny how certain old techniques return to use over and over.